Classroom activity Grade 9 English Language Arts
Water Works Career Fair: A Grade 9 Interview Carousel Activity
A grade 9 station-rotation activity where students interview four in-character water-sector professionals, then draft a career brief using real workforce facts.
Objectives
- Students will conduct structured interviews to gather information about four water-sector careers.
- Students will take organized notes distinguishing a role's daily tasks from its required education.
- Students will draft a one-paragraph career brief citing at least one real workforce fact.
Vocabulary
- Hydrologist
- A scientist who studies where water is, how it moves, and how much there is, from rain and rivers to floods and droughts.
Also: licensure, biotechnology, workforce
Teacher overview
This is a whole-class station-rotation activity for about 24 to 30 students, in which four student "career experts" stay at fixed stations while the rest of the class rotates through in interview teams, gathering information the way a reporter would at a career fair. The four stations represent several different education paths into the water sector, from direct-entry licensure to graduate study, and students physically move between them to interview a peer playing that role. A common misconception this activity addresses is the assumption that every water-sector job requires the same kind of degree; the four stations are built specifically to show that operators, engineers, biotechnologists, and hydrologists enter the field through genuinely different paths, each legitimate in its own right.
Activity Directions
Before class, recruit or assign four students to study one role card each in advance: Operator, Environmental Engineer, Environmental Biotechnologist, and Hydrologist (see the Student Handout for all four cards). Set up four stations around the room, each labeled with a sign and stocked with that station's role card for the assigned expert to reference during the activity.
Setup & instructions (5 min): Explain how the activity works: today's activity is a career fair carousel. Each of the four career experts stays at one station for the whole activity, while the rest of the class splits into four interview teams of about six students. Every seven minutes, teams rotate to a new station until every team has interviewed every expert. Distribute the interview log handout and explain that at each station, teams have seven minutes to ask the expert at least three questions and record answers in the matching row: what a typical day looks like, what education or training the job requires, and one fact from the role card that surprised them.
Round 1 (7 min): Teams interview the expert at their starting station and record notes in row 1 of the interview log.
Round 2 (7 min): Call time, rotate every team clockwise to the next station, and repeat the interview process, recording notes in row 2.
Round 3 (7 min): Rotate again and repeat, recording notes in row 3.
Round 4 (7 min): Rotate a final time so every team has now visited all four stations, and record notes in row 4.
Debrief (12 min): Gather the whole class. Ask two or three volunteers to share one fact from their log that surprised them. Then ask the class which of the four paths (direct entry with on-the-job training and licensure, a four-year engineering degree, a bachelor's degree in biology or environmental science, or a bachelor's degree followed by graduate study) sounded most unfamiliar before today, and discuss briefly as a class. Close by assigning the career-brief paragraph on the Student Handout as an independent follow-up: each student chooses the one role that interested them most and writes a paragraph describing it, citing at least one real workforce fact from the handout.
The activity ends when every student on an interview team has a completed interview log with all four rows filled in and has heard the debrief discussion; the career-brief paragraph may be completed as homework or during a following class period.
Student Handout
Role card: Operator. "I keep the water safe every single day. I check chemical readings, run tests, and respond immediately if anything looks off, because the plant can never just stop." Path into this role: a high school diploma, on-the-job training, and a state license earned by exam, with license classes (I through IV) tied to plant size and experience. Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators earned a median of $60,020 per year as of May 2025. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 10,000 openings for operators each year, on average, from 2025 to 2035, even though total operator employment is projected to decline 6 percent, because all of those openings come from replacing workers who retire or move to other occupations.
Role card: Environmental Engineer. "I design the systems operators run. Before a new pipe, filter, or pump station gets built, I have to model whether it will actually work, and I have to defend that model to people who are paying for it." Path into this role: a four-year bachelor's degree in civil or environmental engineering.
Role card: Environmental Biotechnologist. "I work with the microorganisms that do a lot of the real cleaning in wastewater treatment. My job is figuring out how to help them break down waste more completely, and how to recover useful nutrients from what they leave behind instead of throwing it away." Path into this role: typically a bachelor's degree in biology, environmental science, or a related field, sometimes followed by graduate study.
Role card: Hydrologist. "I study how water moves through the ground and across the landscape, so a city can plan for droughts, floods, and how much water it can safely pump from an aquifer without running it dry." Path into this role: typically a bachelor's degree, often followed by graduate study in hydrology, environmental science, or a related research field.
Water workforce fact (all stations). EPA estimates that roughly one-third of the water sector workforce is eligible to retire in the next 10 years.
Interview log. For each round, record: Station visited | One task this person does | One fact that surprised me | Education path required.
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: Accept any correctly identified fact from a student's log, such as: water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators earned a median of $60,020 per year in May 2025, and about 10,000 openings for operators are projected each year, on average, from 2025 to 2035, all from replacing workers who retire or move to other occupations.
- Debrief question: "Which of the four paths sounded most unfamiliar to you before today?" Answer: Accept any reasoned response that names one specific path (direct entry with on-the-job training and licensure, a four-year engineering degree, a bachelor's degree in biology or environmental science, or a bachelor's degree followed by graduate study) and explains what about it was new information.
Differentiation
Support (below grade level)
Reduce the interview log to two required questions per station instead of three, and provide a word bank of role-specific vocabulary (licensure, degree, microorganism, aquifer) students can reference while writing notes.
Extension (above grade level)
Ask students who finish their career-brief paragraph early to write a second paragraph comparing their chosen role to a second role from the carousel, explaining one similarity and one difference in path or daily work.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "licensure," "degree," and "workforce" with simple definitions before the activity begins, and provide sentence frames for the interview log: "This person's job includes ___." and "This job requires ___."