PART IV: Closing/Debrief

Discussion Questions

Facilitate a discussion using the following questions:

• How did your partner react to the interview experience?
• How did you feel as an interviewer? What challenges or surprises did you encounter, and how did you work to address them?
• Did you have the chance to go “off script” and ask a follow-up question? If so, what question did you ask, and how did that change your interview?
• What question evoked a particularly memorable response?
• What did you learn that changed the way you previously thought about an event, person, or your recording partner?
• What makes an interview different from a text as a historical reference?
• What components contribute to differing perspectives of history?
• What could future historians learn about 2019 from listening to your interview?
• What would you do differently if you were to conduct another interview?
• Who else in your life would you like to interview?
• What questions would you like to be asked in an interview?

Follow-up Activities

Share your interviews with us @StoryCorps #TheGreatListen.
Listen to your interview again.
Watch the Intergenerational Stories playlist with your family at home, and then share some of the stories that make your family unique (use the app to record the conversation, if you like!).
Write a reflection paper, a follow-up essay, or a poem inspired by your interview.
Transcribe a part of your interview, and/or use quotes from your interview to support another project or research paper.
Create a video inspired by a TED Talk with Adobe Spark Video based on the process of preparing for and conducting an interview and present it to the class.
Edit your interview using free editing software (such as Audacity) to create a two-minute excerpt.
Produce a podcast using excerpts from different interviews.
Create a visual storyboard of the process of preparing for and conducting the interview, plus what was learned, and present it to the class.
Draw or paint a portrait of your partner inspired by your interview with them.
Hold an assembly to highlight favorite stories from your class.
Coordinate with your school or local library to start an oral history project.
Use the app to investigate a social issue in your community (make a list of “sources” you’d like to interview).

Extra Credit for Teachers

Host a classroom listening party. Use the community feature on archive.storycorps.org to collect your students’ stories in one central place, and then invite students to share out a 2-3 minute clip from each interview.

Learn more about the new community feature and hear tips from other educators in the StoryCorps in the Classroom Facebook group.