Every journalism teacher knows the gap: students can summarize a source well, but sit them across from a real person and ask them to get a real story, and they freeze. I went looking for something to close that gap and kept finding the same half-resource — a worksheet on writing good questions, and nothing at all on what happens after the source starts talking. No follow-up technique. No guidance on the record versus off it. No framework for whether the sourcing in a set of stories is even representative of anything.
See it on Teachers Pay Teachers — $23.19
So I built the rest of it. Four full press-conference role-play scenarios where the teacher plays the character and students have to work for the story — including a walkout option when questions cross a line. A partner interview assignment that forces students past the obvious answer. And a source diversity tracker adapted from the same auditing practice used by real newsrooms, where the class logs who they’re actually interviewing and compares it to who they’re leaving out.
The question-writing worksheet was never the hard part. What to do once someone’s actually talking to you — that’s the part nobody else had built.
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