A Positively Memorable Classroom Visit

Twenty-five sets of wide-open eyes staring at you, waiting… You open your mouth, but the words won’t form. Your heartbeat intensifies with each contraction and the pounding in your ears is so loud, you think they will explode. Beads of sweat form at your hairline. You hear snickering in the back of the room... If this is what you envision when you think of working with middle school students, you have found the right blog. 

In a future post, I will discuss the “whys”- the reasons you want to get involved in volunteering with ScienceLIVE, but here I discuss some tactics to ensure you have a great experience working with the students in our community.  

I think one of the reasons volunteers hesitate to work with middle schoolers is because they often “tell it like it is”, for better or for worse (thanks, emotional rollercoasters of puberty). I suggest we reframe this thought positively: Isn’t it refreshing that you are interacting with people who tell you exactly what is “so cringy” and what they “literally” need (note, for most middle schoolers “literally” means “figuratively”)? Although they might act “too cool for school”, middle schoolers are generally curious and creative and often won over with exciting science experiments. 

 

The #1 piece of advice to facilitate an exciting and inspirational classroom visit is to create a positive environment for the participants. Tips to do this:

•  Be enthusiastic- excitement is contagious!
•  Be expressive- change the cadence of your voice, emphasize words, don’t stand in place.
•  Be encouraging- let them ask you any STEM related questions.
•  Let the teachers handle reprimands- always keep your personal interactions with students positive.

 

For best practices follow RAISE, an acronym I developed for training our volunteers:  

 

R: Relate to the student’s lives

Try to find common ground with the students. If possible, use pop culture to make comparisons. One of my favorites is to illustrate the enormity of the human genome by asking students how long it would take the Guinness Book of World Records’ fastest texter to text the human genome. (At 8.6 characters per second and diploid genome, the answer is 23.5 years with no breaks for sleeping or eating!)

Students also enjoy observing something visible or tangible and hearing strange facts. To illustrate just how much DNA is in one of our human cells, we do a demonstration where a student volunteer grasps a folded-up, 6-foot long rope and backs away slowly. Anything odd or surprising really leaves an indelible impression.

 

A: Adapt, as necessary

Oh, middle school humor… unexpected, quirky, goofy, and yet, often clever. Don’t let them throw you off your game! Use your training as a scientist to think quickly on your feet and deal with the unexpected.  As long as the joking is not creating an unsafe situation and is not at the expense of another student, laugh with them and then move on with your experiment. YOLO! (insert rolling eyes and cringe of middle schoolers here). 

 

I: Interrupt 

Student participants ask more questions when the scientist volunteers routinely interrupt each other! Maybe you are using jargon or perhaps you are starting to drone on a tad too much. Regardless of the reason, break it up by asking a question or making a connection to a real-life scenario. Successful examples include:

• “I noticed that you said ‘hydrophobic’. I like to remember what that term means by…” and then relate “hydro” to water and “phobia” to fear.
• “Dr. Mary, you just said ‘DNA extraction’, is that the same thing as an 'extraction' in Fortnite?”
• “You just mentioned that we have microbes that live in and on us. Does anyone want to guess how much of your body weight is made up of these microbes?” (The answer is 5 pounds!)

Remember that you will always be in a room without at least one other ScienceLIVE scientist, so use interruption as a tool to keep the conversation moving. Before the visit, we provide you a document with lots of these interesting tidbits. You are welcome to insert your own, too!

 

S: Short and sweet

Brevity is key to keeping students alert and successfully completing the experiment. Therefore, all modules are designed so volunteers only talk for about 3-4 minutes before the students have some active-participation component, followed by the next short talking segment, etc. Although this approach takes us longer to do the experiment, it reduces boredom and tuning us out, keeps the group working at the same pace, and prevents mistakes from missing instructions.

Additionally, come prepared with a concise and informative introduction of yourself and your research interests that is no longer than 30 seconds. I commonly introduce myself this way: “I am Dr. Mary and I am really interested in understanding what types of changes happen in the DNA of normal cells when they become tumor cells and cause cancer”. The good news is that if I start to drone on, you will be there to interrupt me!

 

E: End all interactions positively

Although I mention it at the start, it is worth reiterating here: the overall goal is for the students to have a positive experience with us. We want to encourage students to feel comfortable asking us questions. Therefore, we employ a “yes…and” strategy to answer all questions.

In practice, what does this look like? When a student asks a question and the answer is “yes”, do not end the interaction with just that word. Instead, elaborate. “Yes, that is absolutely true! Great job remembering that viruses contain genetic information but are unable to make copies of themselves without help from cells.” From this interaction, the student feels heard and will be unafraid to ask more questions. Additionally, the students who might not have made that connection will have heard it rephrased again, and the concept may be reinforced. 

More challenging is using this approach to answer a question with a “no” answer. In this scenario, I try to refrain from saying “no” outright and instead identify the misconception and then elaborate. For example, “What an insightful question! I love that you remembered that there are microbes in our body. And you are right, there can be pathogens in our body that make us sick. Keep in mind that we also have lots of microbes in our bodies that are not pathogens and actually help us stay healthy by making vitamins and keeping our immune system functioning. Great question!” Hopefully, this type of positive response keeps the student feeling confident and willing to ask more questions. Answering questions in this manner takes practice, so get started now!