Expert Insights

I find it [teaching] enjoyable, and I think that if you’re enjoying teaching something then your passion and desire and enjoyment gets transmitted to the students.  It’s not necessarily easy to teach, but it’s satisfying and generally we want to inspire them to increase their level of intrinsic motivation to want to continue to study chemistry.

I have one slide where I'm first demonstrating how we use curly arrows and that shows an arrow going in a particular direction from a nucleophile to an electrophile and emphasising that the arrow shows electrons moving - so it's got to start from where they are.  There has to be some electrons there for them to move.  So the whole screen goes black and comes up with a little orange box of 'never do this' which is an arrow starting from an H+, which has no electrons. The dramatic emphasis that the whole room goes dark and then it's just up there.

So the first thing that I really stress that people do, is that they actually go and watch some classes.  I think that’s the most important thing.  When they’re coming straight out of a post doc, or they’re coming straight out of the Research Centre, and then, they’re told they’re going to be lecturing 300 first year students, they’ve got to go and sit in the back of the lecture theatres for a few weeks.... when I came over from the UK to here, and the class sizes are about three or four times as big, it was just a real help to be able to see what worked and didn’t work  – how little time the students were on task in quite a few lectures.  Where the lecturer would just be talking and be oblivious to this.  I think people just learn a lot by seeing good things, but they also learn a lot by seeing quite bad things going on.

So the strategy is to reflect, to change things, to be flexible, to talk to them but not talk down to them, and certainly I would say to any young lecturer don’t be writing the lecture the night before. Know what your course is because then you can jump back and forth as you talk about something.  You can say yeah we talked about this a week ago or something like that, you know. Know what you’re going to talk about, the whole thing, because then you can put it all together as a package.

It now does come down to the quality of the presentation in terms of what you put on the PowerPoint I suppose, cos we all use PowerPoint.  But I try most lectures to switch that off and use the visualiser and write things down by hand, where I can see that something is missing on the PowerPoint, or if I think the students haven’t got a particular message, don’t understand a reaction, don’t know about a mechanism. I’m happy to stop, go to the visualiser and write it down at the correct sort of pace, by which they can actually write it down themselves.

When we’re teaching ideas in chemistry, I liken it to hacking your way through a forest.  It’s all this detail.... and you can’t expect students to do the hard work of fighting your way through the forest or the jungle, unless they have a global view of where they’re going. What I mean by that is, the other factors that influence the way I teach intermolecular forces, is that I keep going back to applications in the real world.  How is it that geckos can crawl up a wall, and almost sit on the ceiling without falling off?  How is it they’re able to stay there with gluey legs or what?  But the interactions between their feet and the ceiling are just, how could they maximise the attractions between the molecules in their feet, and the molecules in the ceiling? So what I’m trying to do all the time is to show applications, powerful, interesting, hopefully, and engaging applications of the ideas that are important. So, for students to engage and to feel, ‘well this is worth hacking my way through the jungle of detail to be able to understand it’, is to zoom out and show them how this topic relates to all of the other topics.  It’s called scaffolding, and it’s a very, very important idea. So, the other factors are essentially the incredible number of other applications of this idea... that the power of an idea is its explanatory power, and when they can see just how important an idea is, in being able to explain all sorts of phenomena, they might be willing to care about it more.

I want them to get the big picture about what analytical chemistry is about in terms of solving an analytical chemistry problem.  They need to know the big picture rather than just focussing on the measurement step.

I find that some students pick up what the mole concept is from the idea of grouping numbers of things that are every day size. 

And it’s so essential, if you are in the middle of a discipline, to have a really well developed sense of what your colleagues around you are teaching, so that you can make connections.

You're learning a new language as well as new concepts. There's lots of vocab, so terms like electrophile and nucleophile and many others. So learning the language, learning the code that we use, the curly arrow code, and then starting to apply that in half a dozen or a dozen or so different contexts, different reactions.

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