I think there are many exciting ways to link a middle school science class to the working world.
One of the things I would love to incorporate into my classroom is visiting ‘teachers’. Having someone in the community who works in a biotech company developing new medications or diagnostics tests for example, would make a very interesting speakers. Someone in Aerospace could speak about physics, a local weather reporter about meteorology. Having an outside speaker would help students link what they are learning to the worlds work force.
The lesson or unit we are working on could determine the type of community speaker we would have. We could then discuss, each day during the lesson, how it would relate to the job the person has who is coming in to speak to us. That way the students would be thinking of the connection during the entire course of the unit.
Another thing we could do is to let each student choose a real world job, like a research biologist, an astronaut, a food scientist, or a physician out of a group of pre-determined jobs, at the beginning of the year. Then if we were doing a unit that might relate to that profession, the student who ‘had’ that job would be our guest speaker and would tell us about how they use what we learned in their job.
