Students will interview a faculty member who teaches in a major of interest. The assignment assist students in developing rapport with faculty, creating questions that require in depth answers, and learning how to synthesize and summarize their major findings.

Students interview a faculty member who teaches in a major in which they are interested.  The assignment helps students become more familiar with the college, with the faculty, to develop summary and paraphrasing skills and to better know the best career path for them.

Students will interview a faculty member who teaches in a major of interest. The assignment assist students in developing rapport with faculty, creating questions that require in depth answers, and learning how to synthesize and summarize their major findings.

This resource provides access to the Northern California Training Academy's Core for Social Workers Module 8 training materials. To learn more about the Academy, please visit humanservices.ucdavis.edu/academy.

Because this lesson involves family interviews, plan to use two different class periods to give students time to conduct an interview in between the two class periods. An alternative would be to invite one family member into the classroom and do a collective interview during a class session. Students could then conduct similar interviews with their own family members as an optional homework assignment.

I use this (fictional) transcript of an initial client interview to get students thinking and talking about the component parts of an initial client interview and how an initial client interview might best be structured. I ask students to read the transcript before class and make an outline of what the interviewer is doing at different points in the interview. In class, I recruit students to read multiple parts of the transcript out loud, with breaks in the action to discuss what the interviewer is doing and how it might be done differently. The interview focuses on disability-based housing discrimination but no prior knowledge of disability or Disability Rights Law is needed for students to understand what's going on.

After the interview is over, you should complete these steps to stand out in the interviewer's mind and to improve your own interviewing skills.

Music: "Energy" by BenSound.com

This lesson emphasizes the importance of properly answering job interview questions and better prepares the students for mock interviews.

Students will review different grammar functions they have learned throughout the semester as well as speak Spanish for the entire lab.

I use this exercise to introduce myself to students and to get them thinking and writing about basic interviewing skills such as asking open and closed questions and using active and passive listening techniques. Students read (fictional) transcripts of two interviews. I ask them to explain in writing which interviewer did a better job and to provide at least three examples of what the interviewers did or didn’t do that made one interview better than the other, with citations to relevant line numbers from the transcripts.

This resource provides access to videos produced and/or used by the Northern California Training Academy to support training for child welfare practitioners. To learn more about the Academy, please visit humanservices.ucdavis.edu/academy.