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:
What problem were they solving and why does it matter?
What geophysical method did they use — is it the one we just learned?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 |