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| Students learn from others & synthesize information-- 2 of the 8 design abilities |
Our students had previously practiced interviewing each other in quick fire design challenges, but my team and I wanted to use this opportunity to explore in more detail the skills that are required to interview another person and then organize and synthesize the information that an interviewer gathers from their interviewee.
As part of the design thinking committee at my school, our first meeting this year was all about breaking down the interview process and what types of skills students may need to practice in order to become proficient empathy interviewers.
My 2nd grade team and I decided to focus on the following:
- The difference between open and closed questions
- How to write good interview questions
- How to build rapport with an interviewee
- How to actively listen during an interview
- Taking notes
- Asking follow up questions
- Organizing notes post-interview
- Synthesizing information from multiple sources (as students would need to use what they learned from both interviews and from reading Dreamers and Stella Diaz...)
How to write questions
We started by talking about the problem/opportunity for design as a whole group. Before we wroteany questions, we needed to determine what we wanted to learn more about-- in this case, what it feels like to not be able to communicate or to not be understood in the place that you live.
We crafted a problem/opportunity statement as a whole group (mostly teacher-led at this point, since students are not yet proficient in writing problem/opportunity statements) and then dove into the idea of open vs. closed questions. The teachers started asking students how we could learn more about the way it felt being in a country where you didn't speak the language. Students brainstormed a variety of questions and we recorded them on a slide for the whole class to see.
A strategy our 3rd grade team recently taught us that we want to use the next time we generate interview questions is to use an empathy map to guide our questioning. What should we ask to learn more about what they do, say, think, feel? I like the idea of giving students a template to help them generate a variety of questions.
Before launching our interview, we also had to discuss what it means to build rapport with an
interviewee. We explained that it might be tough for a stranger to immediately start talking to them about an emotional topic, and that we should ease our way into the interview with lighter "get to know you" questions. And so our 2nd graders added a hand full of opening questions to the list like "where are you from?" and "when did you move here?"
Taking notes
We gave our students a very basic note taking sheet to record what they learned while interviewing our subject, their 2nd grade teacher Mrs. Flores, who herself was an English Language Learner in her early days of school.We didn't want writing to be a barrier for our students during the interview so they were allowed to write, sketch or both. We also talked about the power of recording an interview so that you can go back and listen to the interview later when synthesizing your notes, so we set up an iPad and used the voice recording tool to capture the entire interview.
The interview
We left the list of questions posted that students had generated as a group and then asked for volunteers to ask those questions of Mrs. Flores, keeping in mind that we wanted to practice a "soft start" to our questioning. So we determined as a whole class which question we should start with and a student stood up and asked.
We were pleasantly surprised at how well they paid attention to the flow of questions and politely corrected each other or made suggestions when they noticed that we needed to change our questioning.
Most every one of our 70 students were so engaged in the interview process that they were actively asking for more time to fill in their notes, and were independently asking follow up questions based on Mrs. Flores's answers (a skill we thought we might practice after round 1 of questioning, but it ended up happening really organically!).
We also recorded audio the interview on one of our iPads while the students were asking their questions. This way, we could revisit the interview and analyze our questioning strategies and follow up questions.
After the interview -- synthesizing our learning
We wanted our students to learn more about organizing their notes after interviewing and how to Dreamers book), so we used thinking maps to compare and contrast information from the two sources. We launched this whole class, and then I had my students continue on their own.synthesize what they learned (from both the interview and the
I posted the audio recordings of our interviews into our Google Classroom, plus a video of Yuyi Morales talking more about her book, Dreamers. Students could use the notes that they took live during the interview and could listen to the recordings of Mrs. Flores and of Yuyi Morales to add additional learnings to their thinking map.
The final step-- using those organized notes to write a syntheses statement describing what they learned about how it feels to live somewhere where you don't speak the language.
Impact
It was exciting to see the way that our students' more in depth analysis of their empathy interviews/observations led to more curiosity, additional questioning, stronger connection-making and more thoughtful ideations as we moved through the design process.
Having only previously interviewed their grade level peers in design work, we were also pleasantly surprised to see our seriously and carefully our 2nd graders worked through the interview and analysis process. Working with a real "client" added an authenticity to the work that made it more important to them, and so it became work that they cared about doing well.
