Joseph R. Auriemma, Jr. teaching an ASC investigative-interviewing session

Teach to Talk®

The Investigative Interview Opening Method

Prepare the person before you test the account.

Q: Is Teach to Talk the same as Cognitive Interviewing?

No. Teach to Talk prepares the person to participate before substantive elicitation. Cognitive Interview techniques may be used afterward to facilitate retrieval of additional genuine information.

Teach to Talk® is ASC’s practitioner-developed, research-informed method for beginning consequential interviews. Before substantive questioning starts, the interviewer makes the process understandable, teaches the standard for useful information, rehearses it through the Pen Standard, creates reciprocal controls, verifies readiness, and then hands over the narrative floor.

The goal is not more words. It is the best information genuinely available, with its source, certainty, and limits intact.

Explore Teach to Talk® Training See How the Pen Standard Works

You don’t need a script. You need a strategy.

The Problem

Most people are asked for an account before anyone teaches them the task.

Interviewers routinely tell people to start at the beginning, provide every detail, take their time, and avoid guessing. Those instructions sound obvious to the interviewer. They are not necessarily obvious to the person being interviewed.

What counts as a detail? Should an estimate be reported as a fact? Does “everything” include information learned later? Is silence truly permitted? Can the person correct the interviewer? What happens when memory reaches its limit? When the rules remain hidden, people improvise. They rush, omit, summarize, guess, wait for narrow questions, or blend direct experience with inference and later information. Teach to Talk® makes the task visible before the account begins.

Hidden Rules

The person is expected to perform an unfamiliar communication task without being shown how.

Lost Ownership

Narrow or premature questioning can replace the person’s organization with the interviewer’s theory.

Blurred Information

Observation, inference, estimate, and later-acquired information can quietly merge into one account.

The Method

Teach first. Verify the learning. Then ask.

Teach to Talk® is a pre-elicitation readiness protocol. It does not replace lawful warnings, retrieve memory by itself, determine credibility, or control the later disclosure of evidence. Its job is narrower and foundational: prepare the person to participate before substantive questioning begins.

A successful Teach to Talk® opening is one the person can use, not one the interviewer can recite.

The Five Functions

A strategy that adapts without losing its architecture.

The wording changes with the person, role, authority, vulnerability, and setting. The five functions remain.

Tell the Frame

The interviewer explains who they are, why the conversation is occurring, how it will work, who is present, how it will be recorded or documented, how information may be used, and what meaningful rights, choices, and limits apply. Communication and access needs are addressed before performance is evaluated.

Completion standardThe person can explain the practical frame and has no unaddressed barrier to participation.

Explain the Account Standard

The interviewer teaches that accuracy outranks speed and volume. The person is asked for every genuinely available detail while distinguishing direct experience, inference, estimates, later-acquired information, and genuine limits such as “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.”

Completion standardThe person understands how to keep the source and certainty of information visible.

Apply It Neutrally

The interviewer uses the Pen Standard to let the person practice the rules on neutral material before applying them to consequential memory.

Completion standardThe person demonstrates a source distinction, an appropriate limit, and the ability to qualify or correct information.

Create Reciprocal Control

The interviewer and the person establish pace, silence, clarification, correction, breaks, and shared pause or slow-down signals. Expectations run in both directions.

Completion standardBoth people know how to slow, pause, clarify, correct, and repair the process.

Hand Over After Verification

The interviewer verifies understanding through performance, resolves remaining barriers, makes a proceed, adapt, or delay decision, and then transfers the narrative floor with a broad invitation.

Completion standardThe person demonstrates readiness and the interviewer protects the first account.

Learn the Complete TEACH Opening

The Signature Practice

The pen teaches the standard, and stays to protect it.

The Pen Standard uses the interviewer’s own pen to demonstrate fine-grained description, information access, source boundaries, uncertainty, and the limits of memory. The person first describes what can be observed from across the table. The interviewer then describes and disassembles a familiar pen, showing how experience can provide access to information unavailable to an outsider.

The interviewer also teaches the limit of the analogy: memory is not a physical object available for complete inspection. Experiencing an event does not guarantee that every detail was perceived, retained, or remains retrievable. The pen then stays in the interviewer’s hand as a shared visual cue.

When the pen is raised again, it means

Slow the moment down.

Return to the experience.

Break it into smaller pieces.

Search for genuine detail.

Keep estimates, inferences, and later information identified.

Stop where the memory stops.

The Pen Standard’s One Rule

Never create a detail for the pen.

Object-based detail demonstrations exist in investigative-interviewing practice and research. The Teach to Talk® application is defined by the complete use of the pen: neutral rehearsal, explicit memory boundaries, performance-based teach-back, and a continuing non-accusatory cue used to restore the shared information standard throughout the interview.

The Interview Continues

Teach to Talk® prepares the account. It does not replace the rest of the interview.

Once readiness is established, the interviewer transfers the floor and protects the person’s first narrative. Cognitive Interview techniques may then facilitate retrieval of additional genuine information. Careful questioning clarifies and develops the account. Strategic Use of Evidence, where appropriate, tests the account later without contaminating its beginning.

Prepare participation through Teach to Talk®.
Obtain and protect the first account.
Facilitate retrieval through appropriate Cognitive Interview techniques.
Clarify and develop the person’s information.
Test the account and disclose evidence strategically when the interview plan calls for it.

Teach to Talk® prepares the person. Cognitive Interviewing supports retrieval. Strategic Use of Evidence tests the account. Each function remains distinct.

Same Architecture. Different Authority.

Communication problems travel across sectors. Legal and organizational rules do not.

The five TEACH functions remain consistent. The frame must change with the room.

Law Enforcement and Public Safety

Status, custody, voluntariness, warnings, counsel, recording, safety, and use of statements must be resolved before the account begins.

Workplace and HR Investigations

Authority, investigator role, participation expectations, confidentiality limits, anti-retaliation protections, representation, and information sharing must be clear.

Education and Title IX

Role, process, support measures, privacy limits, advisor participation, institutional policy, and decision-making separation must be accurately framed.

Attorneys and Legal Interviews

Representation, privilege, work-product boundaries, purpose, recording, preparation versus fact development, and downstream use must be understood.

Insurance, Sports, and Other Regulated Settings

Contractual duties, authorization, recording, confidentiality, reporting, safeguarding, and external referral requirements must be tailored to the applicable system.

Promise the process you control, not an outcome you do not.

The Philosophy Under the Method

Strategy remains human, purposeful, and adaptive.

The operational TEACH sequence sits inside ASC’s larger communication philosophy.

Strategic Empathy

Understand the person’s perspective, perceived risk, motivations, and communication needs well enough to create a workable path to information. Strategic empathy does not require agreement and does not promise a preferred outcome.

Purposeful Dialogue

Every question, instruction, pause, and disclosure should serve a defined purpose. The interviewer knows what communication problem each technique is intended to solve.

Adaptive Framework

The interviewer changes language, pace, sequence, and support in response to the person and the conditions without abandoning lawful requirements or the method’s core functions.

The TEACH sequence structures the beginning. The Adaptive Strategies Compass™ helps the interviewer navigate later changes, barriers, and strategic decisions without falling back on a rigid script.

Explore the Adaptive Strategies Compass

Research-Informed. Attribution-Clear.

Established science, practitioner architecture, honest boundaries.

Teach to Talk® incorporates principles supported by Cognitive Interview research, rapport and procedural-justice research, non-coercive information-gathering practices, the Méndez Principles, and other established interviewing work. ASC credits those sources directly.

The complete TEACH sequence and the continuing Pen Standard application are presented as practitioner-developed architecture. The complete protocol has not yet been independently validated as superior to other evidence-based interview openings. ASC therefore describes Teach to Talk® as research-informed and evidence-aligned while developing fidelity measures and opportunities for comparative evaluation.

Established Research Incorporated

Cognitive Interview research
Rapport and procedural-justice research
Non-coercive information-gathering practice
The Méndez Principles
Object-demonstration research (including the South Wales Police “Teach to Talk®” and the DeMo studies)

ASC Practitioner-Developed Architecture

The five-function TEACH opening sequence
The complete Pen Standard application
Performance-based teach-back and verification
The continuing non-accusatory reset cue
Cross-sector framing of the same architecture

Sources and further reading Méndez Principles on Effective Interviewing · Cognitive Interview (Fisher & Geiselman) · Demonstration for More Detail (Boon, Milne, Rosloot & Heinsbroek) · College of Policing investigative-interviewing guidance · FBI HIG research publications · South Wales Police Teach-to-Talk (UK REF case study)

What Participants Learn to Do

Training is measured by performance, not attendance.

Participants practice how to:

Frame public- and private-sector interviews accurately.
Identify access and communication barriers before evaluating an account.
Teach source, certainty, correction, and limits in ordinary language.
Deliver the complete Pen Standard without creating pressure for detail.
Establish reciprocal pace, pause, clarification, and correction controls.
Verify readiness through performance rather than “Do you understand?”
Transfer the narrative floor and protect the first account.
Use the pen later as a neutral reset cue.
Repair an interviewer-caused interruption without accusing the person.
Separate Teach to Talk® from Cognitive Interviewing and Strategic Use of Evidence.

Bring Teach to Talk® to Your Organization

Questions

Common questions about Teach to Talk®.

Is Teach to Talk® a script?

No. It is a function-based opening protocol. Interviewers learn five required functions and adapt their language to the person, authority, vulnerability, setting, and available time.

Is Teach to Talk® the same as Cognitive Interviewing?

No. Teach to Talk® prepares the person to participate before substantive elicitation. Cognitive Interview techniques may be used afterward to facilitate retrieval of additional genuine information.

Does the Pen Standard prove that someone should remember details?

No. The pen demonstrates information access and fine-grained description. It also teaches that memory has limits. Experiencing an event does not guarantee that every detail was encoded, retained, or remains retrievable.

What does the pen mean later in the interview?

It is a shared cue to slow down, return to the moment, break it into smaller pieces, search for genuine detail, preserve source and uncertainty, and stop where memory stops. It is not an accusation and does not require the person to produce more.

Can Teach to Talk® be used with suspects and respondents?

Yes, when it is adapted to the person’s legal and organizational status and does not replace required warnings, rights, representation, consent, or policy protections.

Can it be used in workplace investigations?

Yes. The same communication architecture applies, but the interviewer must accurately explain authorization, role, participation expectations, confidentiality limits, anti-retaliation protections, representation, and information use.

Is Teach to Talk® evidence-based?

Its components are informed by established interviewing and behavioral-science research. The complete proprietary protocol should be described as research-informed or evidence-aligned until it has been independently evaluated as a complete method.

Does Teach to Talk® determine whether someone is truthful?

No. The opening is not a deception test. It is designed to improve the conditions under which a person can provide and qualify an account.