As I was feeling a bit lost on the last session, and wasn’t ready to test anything out in the assigned time in our workshop, I organised with a fellow Technician and PGCerter to test out some interview questions I had been fleshing out.

I got some really useful feedback from Vikki just before my interview which helped me hone down my questions more. I had too many and some of them were probably not directly related to the question enough so I axed a few and tightened up my questions.

It was sooooo good to do a dry run of my questions in an interview scenario, without the pressure of ‘doing it for real’. We had a really interesting back and forth and I was conscious to practice my active listening techniques. I put my phone out of sight and removed as many distractions as possible to focus fully on our conversation. I did find it hard towards the end when I finally looked at the time and realised I had a meeting to go to shortly, this distracted me somewhat! I need to make sure there’s plenty of time either side the interview so that this doesn’t happen in future. I also found out that there is a new feature on teams that transcribes meetings automatically which is a new feature I did not know about!

EDIT: I’ve gone back in and while this feature it good, I will still have to go back through it all and make it into something cohesive. I have only ever used this feature on panopto before, and the teams version seems to be even more partial to picking up strange words and making different meanings from what is said!

Some recall happened during the conversation which was really encouraging, at first the interviewee had said they had never been involved in marking before and then a few questions later and a few more probes, mid-interview it was revealed that they had infact done a marking excercise and they were able to comment on that experience.

Bearing this in mind, and the fact that I had not given my interviewee the questions beforehand I decided that going forward I will disclose my questions before the interview session in order for the subject to have the time and space for recollection….which might mean less probing and more time for the interviewee to speak and think freely. Reflecting on this I also decided to invite participants to think of an experience if possible prior to coming to the interview, or to bring an artefact to talk about.

UPDATE: This was used as part of my email to participants:

Before the interview:

It would be useful if you could please find an artefact to bring to the interview or think of an event to describe your experience of technical assessment. This artefact or experience will be used to start the interview exploration. An artefact could be any image or object, learning resource, an outcome from a lesson or workshop you delivered or attended. 

The technical academic relationship was spoken about a lot without directly asking about it (this was one of the questions I had omitted earlier) so I found it interesting that this was the natural progression of the conversation. However I do wonder if it’s because the interviewee had heard the ‘behind the scenes’ conversations about my project during the workshops. This will become clearer with the individuals I interview who have not had a backstage pass.

I had a total light bulb moment towards the end of our conversation. It flowed on from the question about what technical involvement could look like. The interviewee highlighted the benefit it would have to them as a marker seeing the student perspective on what they had taught- their reflection of what they have learned from you and your window into that. This was something I had not considered- I had never thought about being involved in the marking process as a way to improve your own practice, and to use it as a useful tool to challenge your perceptions of knowledge exchange that has taken place. In my mind I was more focused on perhaps the potential benefits for the students that this was a really interesting unexpected perspective. I really hope my other interviews provide we with more unexpected insights.