Interview in Three Rounds

A cooperative structure in fours, in which students interview each other in pairs about one topic and then report to the four what their partner answered. The letters are fixed: A pairs with B, C pairs with D. For each topic everyone first thinks up their own questions in silence (45 seconds), then A interviews B while C interviews D (90 seconds), then the roles turn over (90 seconds), and finally the turn goes round the four and each person says in one sentence what their partner told them (3 minutes). Every topic you prepare becomes its own round of those four steps.

The three the name refers to are the core: the interview, the swap and the reporting. The page counts five because the player projects two more things as timed steps of their own, which descriptions usually drop: forming the fours (2 minutes, first round only) and the silent thinking time in which everyone comes up with their questions (45 seconds). That thinking time is not a warm-up but the step that gives the slower thinker a chance, which is why it is on the screen instead of in a footnote. If the fours are already sitting together, set the first step to 0 seconds and it disappears — then the page counts four.

One topic costs almost seven minutes at the default times: 45 seconds thinking up questions, two times 90 seconds interviewing and 3 minutes reporting. Add 2 minutes once for forming the fours and handing out the letters, roughly a minute per round for naming the topic and calling the swap, and 2 minutes for the closing question to the class. So one topic is about twelve minutes and two topics about twenty. Whoever prepares the structure sets the time per step themselves, in steps of fifteen seconds; a step at 0 seconds is skipped by the player. The times here are a starting point, not a prescription: a talkative four runs over, a younger class with a light topic finishes early.

Make the remainder one three. There A interviews B, B interviews C and C interviews A — so everyone is interviewed and everyone interviews — and the reporting goes round as usual. It costs that group one extra interview round, which means they reach the reporting half a minute later; just let them carry on. A five works less well: someone listens in on an interview instead of conducting one, and that is exactly the student you wanted talking. The player says so itself in the setup when the class size does not come out evenly.

Topics. Every line in the field becomes its own round of four steps, and the questions about it are thought up by the students in the first step — that is the difference from working through a list. A good topic is one short sentence someone can think up questions about, and it is about their own experience or opinion: "what made this summer a good one for you?" works, "what did you do this summer?" is already the question. Leave the field empty and you only choose the number of rounds, naming the topic yourself, letting a student pick one, or reading it off a card. Out of ideas? Ask Microsoft Copilot: "Give me 5 conversation topics about [theme] for students aged [age]. A topic is one short sentence a student can think up their own questions about — not a ready-made question. It has to be about the student's own experience or opinion. One topic per line, no numbering."

Give them one follow-up, and only one. Put "what do you mean by that?" on the board and agree that every interviewer asks it exactly once. That works better than "why?", which students hear as an accusation, and better than a list of five questioning techniques nobody will use in ninety seconds. The other half of following up is what the interviewer does not do: no opinion, no additions, no "oh, same here". Walk around during the first interview and correct it out loud at one group; the rest of the class hears it and adjusts.

All three share out speaking time, but they deliver different things. In taking turns everyone gives their own short answer in turn and the group collects a lot of them in five to fifteen minutes; there is no following up and no reporting. In on time everyone speaks for a fixed half minute while the rest listen without reacting — that trains finishing your thought and listening without interruption, in two and a half minutes. Interview in Three Rounds is the slowest of the three and the only one with both following up and reporting: you hear fewer answers, but you know listening happened. Start with on time if a class still has to learn to stay quiet; take the interview once they are allowed to respond to each other.

Inner & outer circle has the whole class answer the same question to a different partner each time: the gain is in the number of different people you speak to, and there is no fixed group and no reporting step. Interview in Three Rounds keeps one fixed four and adds exactly that reporting step, which is what makes listening enforceable. Want speaking time, variety and movement? Take the circles. Want listening that actually happens, and an answer repeated by someone else? Take the interview. They also work in sequence: the circles to warm the topic up, then the interview to go deeper.

Three things carry the structure. One: the grouping. Draw the fours or assign them, hand out the letters and have them written down — a four that cannot remember who D was at the swap comes to a stop. Two: the interviewer's role. Say before the first interview that the interviewer listens, follows up once and gives no opinion, and correct the first breach out loud; after that the class does it itself. Three: announcing the reporting. Say before the first interview starts that everyone will afterwards tell the four what their partner said — that changes how they listen, and it is the cheapest move in the whole structure. During the interviews you walk around without joining in; after the reporting you ask the class one thing: which answer surprised you?

It belongs to cooperative learning and is known in the literature as Three-Step Interview, described by Spencer Kagan. It rests on two principles that are clearly visible here: individual accountability — you will have to report what your partner said, so sitting it out does not exist — and simultaneity: two conversations run at once in every four, so half the class is talking instead of one student. In the Dutch teaching literature, in Ebbens and Ettekoven, the structure appears as the driestappeninterview. The silent thinking time before the interview goes back to Mary Budd Rowe's wait time research.