Today Professor Shahir Rizk and Ph.D. Candidate Maggie Fink join us to discuss their thoughts on effectively communicating science.  Our conversation is wide-ranging, and goes through fostering fascination, treating people with dignity, listening (instead of trying to change minds), telling stories, and deciding what you want people to leave the room with. 

Shahir and Maggie developed and host a science communication workshop and they are also hard at work on an upcoming popular science book on proteins that they are signed to publish with Harvard press. Their website is foldingmoonlight.com.

You know that thing you want to do, that doesn't quite seem doable? Maybe it’s outside your expertise, or is a departure from what people expect from you. Maybe you’re not sure you can even do it. I bet you can.

Claire recently was co-chief scientist of a two-week research cruise off the coasts of Oregon and California. In this episode, Ruth asks Claire about her experience. Pre-cruise, Claire was really nervous and had many fears of failure, but once there, she really enjoyed the leadership role and being fully immersed in the collaborative research project. She also found, to her surprise, that being a leader on a ship was very similar to leading a class: lo and behold, teaching and research are intertwined.

An empowering lesson from the cruise: with time to focus on them, things that seem impossibly hard are often completely doable.

Are you doing a big project? What tips do you have? Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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You know what it is - that type of studying that you wish all your students would do more. How can we put that into our assignments?

Claire is excited about her homework philosophy that 1) has very clear goals laid out for students, and 2) provides explicit scaffolding for how to get there, with 3) loads of practice problems. However, there are aspects of her assignment that don’t encourage the students to make full use of the scaffolding and knowledge of the goal. Here she and Ruth brainstorm solutions to that.

It’s really important to Ruth for the students to practice laying out the problem and have a system for approaching new problems. So she has a smaller number of problems assigned, she grades for methodology, and she supplements that with suggesting other problems from the book for even more practice. However, this isn’t scalable to large classes, so she and Claire brainstorm solutions to that. 

They refer to Specifications Grading, which they discuss in detail in Episode 124.

What do you like in homework assignments? Share your thoughts with us at contactprofessorpodcast@gmail.com. 

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