Megan Hays '09, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology

Collaborating With The Community: Franklin & Marshall College Science Teaching Internship and the School District of Lancaster

During her time at Franklin & Marshall, aspiring veterinarian Megan Hays found ways to share her love of science with the next generation of students. Serving as a science intern for two semesters at James Buchanan Elementary School, Hays was responsible for preparing instruction plans, assembling materials, conducting experiments and teaching lessons each week.

A lesson on density, for instance, turned into the construction of lava lamps from empty water bottles. “I asked my kindergarten students to choose one dense and one not dense liquid, like water and vegetable oil, for their lamp,” she says. “We added 2/3 of the dense liquid and 1/3 of the water to the bottle, along with the food coloring of their choice, and one tablet of Alka-seltzer to make the bubbles float through the dense liquid—the ‘lava.’ They loved it.”

Hays is one of 226 Franklin & Marshall students who have participated in the Science Internship Program since its inception in 2000. When she was asked by Professors Andy and Carol de Wet to help analyze the impact of the program, she jumped at the chance. “We just wanted to prove that it is a worthwhile and valuable program,” she says. “Aside from student-teaching assignments, schools that do not offer teaching degrees usually don’t have anything like this program.”

Hays and Carol de Wet developed a survey to send to teachers who have participated in the internship. They wanted to learn if teachers noticed increased enthusiasm among students when the science interns came and what they thought of the quality of their lessons.

What they found was that teachers appreciated the F&M interns not just for their efforts and passion, but also for the caliber of the science knowledge they bring to the classroom. “Many of the teachers have admitted that they do not know all of the science concepts that they’re supposed to be teaching their kids or they just aren’t comfortable with it because they haven’t studied science in so long,” Hays says.

While the analysis of the data is still under way, Hays says the results have been overwhelmingly positive so far. The teachers say their science grades have improved and their students have become more enthusiastic about science. They look forward to the science interns’ visits and many of them use lesson plans from previous years’ interns with their current students.

“I think that’s because the majority of interns are science majors,” Hays says. “They realize that if someone just lectures at you, it’s boring, but if you get to do hands-on experiments, it’s so much more exciting. That’s what we take to the schools.”