Conducting an Interview with Education Stakeholder

This paper provides two summaries of interviews conducted with a school principal and a parent of a student attending the school. The interviews were designed to obtain data on how the two interviewees viewed their respective interests and needs. The principal saw the school’s interests and needs as focusing on diversity, ethnicity and community support. The parent saw the needs of the students and parents as being underrepresented in the school. The parent wished the school would invite more community leaders into the school as a practical example of how students should want to live and give back to the community. The paper concludes with an analysis of the interviews and suggestions for how the school could address its truancy issues.

When I interviewed the principal of my school about the interests and needs of the school, the principal responded with great consideration and thoughtfulness. I asked how often needs assessments are conducted by the school and the principal responded that theses assessments are important and thus conducted every quarter using surveys as well as quality control meetings (Principal, personal communication, Jan. 25, 2018). The school uses a data manager to analyze the data and then presents the findings to the school, which are then used to help teachers make adjustments to curriculum where needed. Data is communicated via software that provides teachers and administrators with access to a “dashboard” where targeted areas (interests and needs) are identified and described by the data presented by the data manager.

The principal described a vision for the school that embraced diversity and the concept of community. The principal wants students to feel comfortable so that they can “fully maximize potential” (Principal, personal communication, Jan. 25, 2018). The principal wants to promote social justice at the school and have teachers there who have the same ethnicity as the students. Community is also important because teachers have to be able to understand the community from which the students hail in order to fully support and educate them.

As for truancy, it is a serious problem at the school and is nearly 4 times higher than the state’s truancy rate. The principal wants to incentivize students to come to school but also needs to make it clear that there are consequences for skipping school. To reduce truancy, teachers are expected to contact parents when they begin to notice trends so that parents and teachers can work together to make the community stronger.

When I interviewed the parent, the parent expressed positive feelings towards the school, stating that the “school really wants to see my child grow and eventually go to college and be successful” (Parent, personal communication, Jan. 26, 2018). The parent felt, however, that the school could benefit from stronger disciplinary policies as well as from having a better understanding of students’ home life. The parent would also like to see the school supporting community-engagement on the part of students. Schools should be directing students to better their own communities. The school could reduce its truancy issue by being a place where students want to be and helping parents develop strategies for guiding defiant students/children. The parent stated that the school could be more engaged with community leaders who would be willing to come to the school and talk to students and show them a good example of what it means to be an adult.

The interviews reflected a sense of awareness both within the school and within the community that more needs to be done to address the issue of truancy and school-community relations. However, both the school and the community appear to have different ideas about what should be done. The parent interviewed suggested that while the school clearly wants students to succeed, it should do more to understand the needs of students, their home life, their communities, and should be reaching out to community leaders to come to the schools and help to inspire the students to want to be better. The principal interviewed relied on academic concepts like the importance of diversity and representational ethnicity among the educators in order to inspire students. The principal wanted to reduce truancy by incentivizing students but also by punishing them if they continued to miss school. The parent’s approach to address needs was more practical and community-oriented, and the principal’s approach was more theoretical and school-oriented. In order to facilitate an appropriate merger of perspectives, the school should work more closely with the community in order to integrate the community’s recommendations into its approach, so that its approach is more holistic, intuitive, and specialized (Stetson, Stetson, Sinclari & Nix, 2012; Kristjansson, 2014). This will help the school to reach the students in the most beneficial manner possible (Smith, 2013).

The formalized approach to data collection used in the school is less intuitive and less connected to the actual needs of the community than it should be. It uses interviews with teachers and test scores to identify needs that are used to make changes in the curriculum, but as the parent pointed out, the school must move beyond the curriculum to address the real issues—which are issues of maturity, place, responsibility, and growing up to care for one’s community. The curriculum is not the solution to the needs that the parent is pointing out, nor will a change in curriculum be likely to inspire students to want to be better at school and attend more classes. The school, instead, needs to find a way to reach students outside the classroom, so that education becomes an experience that is not confined to a desk but is rather a state of mind that the students want to engage with and take part in. If the students cannot connect school with place and community and identity, they will not have a deep-down desire to attend school, to grow, and to be better people so that they can serve their community. The school, in this sense, needs to clarify its goals and focus more on how it, too, can best serve the community and its students.