Field Trip Notes

Hints on How to Field Trip

• Goals/Objectives 

  • Address the barriers to engaging with field trip hosts

  • Develop active listening skills

  • Discern differences between a conversation and an interview

  • Discern differences between informational questions and probing questions

  • Identify interview strategies that help the interviewer, as well as those that help the interviewee

  • Practice interviewing skills with a peer

• Schedule overview

  • Discuss the barriers to productive field trip participation

  • Discuss differences between conversations and interviews

  • Practice interviewing peers

  • Debrief peer interviews

  • Discuss methods and rationale for recording

Introduction (5 minutes)

• Explain the purpose of this session

  • During the course of your semester, you will have opportunities to interact with a wide variety of professionals working in different parts of the food system, particularly on our weekly field trips. 

  • These people have much to offer, and have been thoughtfully selected by your faculty from a huge pool of possible field trip destinations. They have skills, knowledge, experiences, and connections to share that will be helpful to you now and in the future. The field trips are both learning and networking opportunities!

  • We will interact with the majority of these individuals only once during the summer.

  • Some will be better teachers than others, some will be better communicators than others, but it is YOU who has the most control over whether or not you learn something from them, and what it is that you actually learn.

  • So, we will work on developing some shared understandings and helpful skills that will be conducive to productive engagement with our field trip hosts.

• Lay out the schedule:

  • We’ll cover some barriers to field trip engagement.

  • We’ll discuss different ways of talking with people.

  • We’ll practice talking with each other.

  • We’ll debrief how that went.

  • We’ll discuss other dynamics to consider while talking with others.

Session Activities (70 minutes)

• Engagement Barriers

  • Overview

    • Discuss and offer solutions to the barriers to good field trip engagement: physical discomfort, lack of awareness about hosts, and underdeveloped interview skills.

  • Length

    • 10 minutes

  • Possible script

    • In the past, we have observed that students can have a hard time remaining engaged on field trips. We have thought it over and identified a few barriers that may have been contributing to that. So, let’s talk about these barriers as well as some solutions to them.

    • physical discomfort. It is important that you pay attention to and tend to your own physical needs. Physical discomfort is a huge barrier to learning. Set yourself up for success! Bring a good lunch AND snacks to keep you going throughout the day. Make sure you have a full water bottle (or two) and drink regularly. A hat with a brim can go a long way toward keeping you comfortable on a hot sunny day. And speaking of hot and sun, if we’re spending too much time in the sun, or too much time standing still, speak up! Use your voice to advocate for your own physical comfort. I would much rather pause a good conversation to move to a spot that is more comfortable, than just push through discomfort and not have you retain anything from the discussion.

    • [Pause for questions or reflections]

    • lack of awareness about our field trip hosts. It’s hard to get excited about visiting someone or somewhere if you don’t know why you should be excited. To address this challenge, you all will have opportunities to research our hosts and then present about them to the rest of the cohort.

    • [Pause for questions or reflections]

    • finally, underdeveloped interview skills. That’s what we’ll spend the rest of our time in this session working on.

• Interview Primer

  • Overview

    • Discuss differences between conversations and interviews. Discuss goal setting going into an interaction. Discuss different types of questions. Discuss active listening strategies.

  • Length

    • 15 minutes

  • Possible script

    • What is the difference between a conversation and an interview? A conversation is a casual social activity. An interview is a learning experience where you are trying to gain some sort of information. In order to engage well on our field trips, it will be important to keep this distinction in mind, and to be viewing our field trip interactions as interviews.

    • What does it take for an interview to be successful? Without some intentionality, an interview can end up being quite unhelpful, which wastes both our time and that of our host. However, there are a few strategies that can help make sure an interview is everything we want it to be.

      • Come in with goals. Be clear on what you want to gain from the interview, as well as how much time you have to achieve those goals. If possible, articulate those goals to our host. It’s unfair to them if they don’t know what we are hoping to get out of our time together. This requires forethought!

      • Ask the right kinds of questions. There are clarifying questions and there are probing questions. You can think of clarifying questions as a “Siri question” that can often be answered by an internet search. A probing question requires deeper thought on specific knowledge and/or experience that only your interviewee has. 

      • “Siri questions” have their place, and can provide a good springboard, especially if we are ready with probing questions. Probing questions invite the interviewee to say more about a topic. These are useful in achieving our goals, and can lead to interesting, unexpected learning. Our time will be limited with these folks, so let’s get the most out of it! 

      • [Distribute Pocket Guide to Probing Questions]

      • The final strategy to help make an interview successful is called active listening. Is this a familiar term? What does that mean?

      • Active listening is a set of behaviors that give someone cues to know you are not just listening, but interested in what they are saying and you are comprehending it. Some good active listening strategies include making eye contact, leaning in, appropriate facial reactions, nodding, small verbal reactions (e.g. “mmhmm”, “yeah”, “wow”, etc.), repeating what was said to check your understanding, writing notes.

• Interview Practice

  • Overview

    • Students will practice interviewing each other using the strategies just discussed. Facilitator will provide prompts.

  • Length

    • 20 minutes (9 minutes per interview)

  • Possible script

    • Now you’ll each have 7 minutes to practice what we just discussed, both as an interviewer and an interviewee. Please find a partner. [If there is an odd number, the facilitator can be a partner] Decide who will take on which role first. After each interview prompt is read, you’ll have 2 minutes to prepare for the interview. That means the interviewer should be coming up with a couple goals and drafting a couple good probing questions. The interviewee should be thinking about their response to the prompt so they’re ready to answer the questions completely and thoughtfully.

    • Here’s your first prompt:

      • Describe a formative place in your life

    • [After 2 minutes of preparation time, ask them to begin the interview]

    • [Give a time warning at 6 minutes]

    • Time’s up! Now switch roles and use this prompt:

      • Describe a significant experience you have had involving food

    • [After 2 minutes of preparation time, ask them to begin the interview]

    • [Give a time warning at 6 minutes]

    • Time’s up! 

• Interview Discussion

  • Overview

    • Share overall impressions of how the peer interviews went. Share about strategies that helped the interviewee. Share about strategies that helped the interviewer. 

  • Length

    • 15 minutes

  • Possible script

    • This can be an open conversation - as opposed to an interview - though I would like to hear something from each of you.

    • First, what are your general impressions after that? How did it go? How did it feel?

    • Think about when you were the interviewee. What kinds of things did the interviewer do that were helpful for you?

    • Now think about when you were the interviewer. What kinds of things did the interviewee do that were helpful for you?

    • You all just identified some interview best practices! Good job! Make note of them and keep them in mind for future interactions.

• Other Considerations

  • Overview

    • Discuss the various impacts, methods, and reasons for recording an interview in different contexts.

  • Length

    • 10 minutes

  • Possible script

    • Ok, let’s focus on recording information from interviews. First, why bother recording information from an interview? 

      • Our brains retain very little information on their own, especially if they're only receiving it aurally. Engaging other senses, other parts of the body, and thus other parts of the brain helps to cement that information in our memory. So, the physical act alone of taking notes will help you absorb and retain information. Plus, then you will have a written record to go back to and fill in anything missing in your memory.

    • What did you do to record information in your interviews with each other? What worked well? What was challenging?

    • Taking notes, recording audio, and recording video are the main methods of recording information. Each one has different strengths and limitations. 

    • Which method makes sense for our field trip interactions?

      • Maybe some of each! If a host is demonstrating a skill, taking a video - or at least pictures - will be very useful for remembering that experience. However, it’s always important to get consent before taking videos or pictures on our field trips.

      • Video or audio recording an interview time would certainly capture all the content, but will require much more time and effort to go back and watch or listen to if you’re trying to find a specific piece of information. For that reason, note taking will be our best tool for the interview parts of our field trips. 

      • It may be difficult to capture everything they are sharing, so writing shorthand - i.e. not full sentences, abbreviating words - will be helpful. 

      • There may also be things that come up that you’ll want to follow up on, either then and there or after the field trip is over. For that reason, it’s really helpful to divide your notebook page top to bottom, about ⅔ of the way to the right. That allows you a good bit of space on the left side of the page for taking notes on the info being shared. At the same time, it provides space to jot down those questions or other follow-up points (e.g. websites, books, etc.) in the same space in the interview without getting mixed up with your notes.

Conclusion (15 minutes)

• Check for understanding

  • How can you help yourself be physically prepared to engage well with others?

  • What is the difference between a conversation and an interview?

  • What are some good interview strategies?

  • What are some poor interview strategies?

  • What is the purpose of a probing question?

  • How and why would you record our field trip hosts?

  • What does all this have to do with your coursework?

• Wrap up

  • Thanks for actively participating in that, everyone. Continuing to practice and improve your interviewing and note-taking skills - and paying attention to your own physical needs - will pay huge dividends this summer and beyond. Being able to engage well with our field trip hosts will help you to get the most out of your experience, and potentially open up doors for you in your academic and professional careers.

Materials List

• Notebook per student

• Whiteboard or Flipchart

• Timer

• Pocket Guide to Probing Questions (SRI, 2014), one copy per student