Being the Interviewer and the Interviewee

As I was reading this article, I kept thinking about why we were given this article to read. Not having a clear perspective to take on as I read this article allowed me to read this article as if I was learning how to prepare to be interviewed as well as learning how to engage in questioning students.

As I was reading this article as an future interviewee, I tried to get an idea of the questions I could expect as well as the thoughts that might be going through the interviewer’s mind. While I may not know the exact questions being asked, knowing that interviewers often like to hear stories from my experience allows me to ready some of my experiences in advance. I also found the idea of interviewers listening to an “inner voice” important to note. Controlling whether I use my public voice or inner voice may not be something that I can easily control but I am sure that just having an awareness of this difference will help in letting my guard down a bit.

I also felt that there was must to be taken from this article as I was reading this as one who would be at the front of the class ‘interviewing’ students. Going back to the idea of listening to an inner voice, I believe this is completely determined by how the interviewee views the environment. If we are able to create a environment which is respectful of the thoughts of others, the responses we receive will be unguarded. This means that we should be careful not to shut down ideas be they wrong or right. The idea of wait time comes up in the section about tolerating silence. What this article brought to my attention that others had not was the idea that our discomfort in silence is projected onto those we are interviewing. If we interrupt their thinking processes with our silence-breaking questions, how are we making those we ask the questions to feel?

For both sides, I believe that while we may prepare questions ahead of time or prepare for questions ahead of time, we must not stick too rigidly to these. The questions we ask and the questions we receive will change according to the responses we give and receive and we must prepare for that.