Interview With Margaret Boettcher
Margaret Boettcher was one of the scientists who participated in the “Telling Your Story” workshop held at WHOI on January 22, 2004. Margaret is a graduate student in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Marine Geology and Geophysics working toward her Ph.D.
Soon after the workshop, Margaret visited a sixth grade classroom and had a chance to test her new skills. She reported on her experience during an interview with COSEE-NE evaluators.
How did the teacher contact you? Did you have a good idea of what the teacher expected from you?
The teacher who contacted me is a friend. I have a good relationship with her, so it was easy to get info about what she expected, which was important since I hadn’t spent time with sixth graders in many years.
Part of the sixth grade curriculum is earth science. During the year, my friend’s students would write “questions for the geologist,” which were the questions she couldn’t answer. So, while I was at the classroom, I went through the questions.
How much experience do you have giving presentations to students?
Before this, I’d only given one small talk to 10 or 15 kids. For this recent classroom visit, I had a lot of kids -- three groups of 60 sixth graders --180 students in total.
Why were there such big groups of students to present to? Did that make it difficult?
It’s something they do at her school. When outside speakers come, they pull kids together from three different science classes, so that all the students get to see the presentation. I talked to the students in regular classroom, which was very small for the large group; kids were sitting around the edges and were excited to be sitting next to their friends. Fortunately, my friend, their teacher, was good at crowd control.
What kind of pre-planning did you do? Did you work with the teacher?
We talked in general terms. She described their curriculum a couple different times, She related questions they’d been asking, and told me what they would be interested in. I knew they had this box of questions, so I didn’t want to prepare a talk that would take the full time.
Were the strategies you learned at the workshop helpful as you planned your visit? Which did you use, if any?
I used the concept mapping exercise. It was useful in terms of thinking about what topics I wanted to hit and how to direct the flow of my talk. The main suggestion from the workshop that I used was to tell people what it is like to be a scientist – that is something that they don’t know. It helped direct my talk -- to include the science as well as what it is like to be a scientist.
What did you present?
I put together a presentation with maps, pictures of fault movements, earthquake destruction, information about plate tectonics, and some specifics of my own work and research experiences. I started by looking at maps and asked students questions about larger tectonic features, and then talked about how people study those features. I told them a few tidbits about what we know -- things that the teachers hadn’t gotten across to their students.
Then I went more into my experiences leading up to where I am now. I talked about my life as a scientist, the places I travel to for research, what I study there and how great it is to be a scientist. I talked for maybe 10 minutes, and then it became more interactive. Most kids asked good questions.
Did the workshop strategies prove effective for you? Please describe.
Yes. Having a workshop in combination with giving presentations was useful.
The workshop gives you a framework to evaluate the experience.
Overall, how do you think your presentation went?
It went pretty well. It’s always hard when there are so many kids in one room. I was glad I’d been to the workshop, so I knew that the kids and teachers would be more interested in the career of scientists, rather than all the details of science.
Do you have any way of knowing the presentation was successful?
I got some feedback – the teachers who were present for the talk gave me feedback, thanking me, and told me what they really liked. And I got thank you notes from all the kids.
I talked to my friend few days afterwards, and her feedback was positive. She mentioned some of the specifics that the kids thought were cool, and told me the students liked knowing about what the life of a scientist is like.
Do you have any plans for follow up?
I expect to do it again next year.
Do you have any recommendations for the COSEE-NE team at WHOI, as they plan their next “Telling Your Story” workshop and/or other systems of support for scientists, researchers, and students? Based on your recent experience, what other kind of information or help would be useful to you?
The only thing I can think of immediately is creating an avenue of connecting scientists and researchers who participate in the workshop with teachers that would like a scientist to visit their class. During the workshop, scientists got excited. If they knew they were going to visit a classroom within the next few months, they’d have a goal. Doing it just hypothetically is not as good.
The workshop was useful. And it was essential that they have a teacher there to help train the scientists.