The right kind of telling? Locating the teaching of interviewing skills within a systems framework

There is a gradually expanding literature addressing the teaching and learning of interviewing skills in social work education. The process of professional learning in the wider field is not fully understood; empirical studies are rare and methodological differences make comparison difficult. Few papers offer a theoretical basis for methods of teaching. The article starts with a short account of the literature, with more explication of papers whose themes are closely related to those of this article; a consideration of skills training on social work qualifying programmes follows. Next, Agazarian's (1997) theoretical framework is presented and then the theory and methods of practice are employed to make sense of obstacles to learning and to demonstrate how to overcome them. Finally, potential areas for further research are suggested.