# Five Reusable Discussion Formats
Each format appears 2–3 times across the 10 weeks. Repetition builds student familiarity with the structure so more energy goes to content than to logistics.
## Format A — The Paper Autopsy
Weeks 1, 5, 9
Students receive a 2-page excerpt (abstract + key figures) from a recent, accessible paper **48 hours before** the session. Three organizing questions:
1. What problem were they solving and why does it matter?
2. What geophysical method did they use — is it the one we just learned?
3. What would you do differently, or what question does this paper leave unanswered?
The instructor pushes hardest on question 3. This format builds paper-reading fluency and directly links lecture content to frontier research. Papers are selected to be understandable at undergraduate level despite being current (2023–2025).
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## Format B — The Practitioner Conversation
Weeks 3, 6, 8
A guest provides **10–15 minutes of context** (their work, one surprising result, one thing that failed), then 35 minutes of student-driven Q&A. Students submit 2 written questions before the session — collected at the door — and the instructor uses these to seed Q&A if silence falls.
Guest profiles rotate:
- **Week 3** — UW PhD student (near-peer)
- **Week 6** — PNW industry geophysicist
- **Week 8** — Science communicator or policy analyst (boundary-crosser)
The format normalizes talking to scientists as a skill and demystifies career paths. Critically: the guest should share something **unfinished or uncertain** — not a polished success story.
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## Format C — The Relevance Map
Weeks 2, 7
Groups of 3 work for 20 minutes with a single prompt:
> "You have the method we just learned. Here is a real problem [specific to the week]. What would you measure, where, and why? What are the limits of your method for this problem?"
Groups present their **reasoning** (not their answer) in 3 minutes each. The instructor asks follow-up questions that reveal assumptions rather than evaluating correctness. This format builds the habit of translating method knowledge into application reasoning — exactly what job interviews and research proposals demand.
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## Format D — The Science Communication Workshop
Weeks 4, 10
**Week 4:** Students prepare a 90-second verbal explanation of one geophysics concept (their choice) for a non-specialist audience. Delivered to a partner, critiqued with a simple peer rubric:
- Was there unexplained jargon?
- Was the "why it matters" clear?
- Was there an analogy?
**Week 10:** Students deliver a 3-minute capstone elevator pitch (problem, method, finding, why anyone outside this room should care), peer-reviewed with the rubric they designed in Week 8.
This format directly trains what the USGS calls "risk translation and communication" — moving science across the expert-public boundary.
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## Format E — The Open Problem Session
Weeks 1 (partial), 9 (partial)
The instructor brings one **genuinely open question** in current geophysics — not a solved problem, not a textbook exercise, but something where the answer is unknown or contested. Students read a 1-page explainer (15 min), then discuss:
- What would you need to know?
- What data would help?
- What method could address it?
Example open problems:
- *"Why do we still struggle to predict induced seismicity from injection operations?"*
- *"Why do seismic tomography models of the deep mantle disagree at large scale?"*
This format builds **tolerance for ambiguity** — the most important disposition in research — and normalizes that geophysics has a rich frontier of unanswered questions.
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## Summary
| Format | Sessions | Core activity |
|--------|----------|---------------|
| A — Paper Autopsy | Weeks 1, 5, 9 | Pre-read excerpt; 3 organizing questions |
| B — Practitioner Conversation | Weeks 3, 6, 8 | Guest 10–15 min; student Q&A 35 min |
| C — Relevance Map | Weeks 2, 7 | Groups apply method to real problem; present reasoning |
| D — Sci-comm Workshop | Weeks 4, 10 | 90-sec / 3-min verbal pitch; peer rubric |
| E — Open Problem | Weeks 1, 9 | 1-page explainer; open discussion of unknowns |