Week 2 - Thursday July 12th, 2012 - The Lab Meeting...

This Wednesday, Valerie and I were able to sit in on our lab's weekly LAB MEETING - during this meeting lab business (who broke what, what needs to be replaced, who is coordinating the lab outing) is discussed, and one member of the lab does a PowerPoint presentation about how her research is currently going.

Since each member of the lab is working on different projects, the presenter must provide background and technical knowledge to the crowd, explain what has lead to where she is now, what roadblocks she is still encountering in her research, and what she plans to do next. Not only is the lab member presenting this material, she then is peppered with questions from the rest of the lab about why she did this or didn't do that. 

This entire meeting was a great learning opportunity for me both as a researcher and as a teacher. First of al,l it filled in some of the pieces of technical understanding I was missing. Secondly, it emphasized the importance of presentation skills! In high school science classes this skill is mostly overlooked. I do some presentation work with my seniors, but this made me want to do more and come up with different, some more formal, some more informal options for presenting work. I would also love to find a way to bring this into my sophomore Chem I classes. 

On a related note, our brown bag lunch talk this week with Prof. Ruane was mainly about the publish or perish cycle of how to get research communicated. He discussed the large number of ways communication occurs in the scientific community. From this lecture I am going to try to come up with more ways my students can learn to communicate what they are learning. From 2 paragraph "letters" they could write at the end of class to get the buzz out there right away about what they learned that day, to written "journal article" lab reports that take some time to produce I hope to find more ways to fold this aspect of science, scientific communication, into my classroom.