[Analytical chemistry] is probably one of the things that’s easiest to tie back to their own experiences. Because it’s very easy to link the idea of the importance of chemical measurement, is actually pretty easy to get across.
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.
Too often I think students and others think that analytical chemistry is just that measurement step. When you use the AA, when you use the ... and doesn’t take into account, well all of the other stuff, what’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve? What are you actually trying to do, sampling, measurement, validating your results? Because only then when you’ve got a result, only then does it actually become information.
I think to get the students to straight away mark for somebody else what they’ve just done and then to mark or take part in the marking of two other versions of the same thing is really powerful. So it’s not so much me directly finding out what they do and don’t understand but using methods by which they can diagnose for themselves. I haven’t got this, she has, or yep I have got most of that, she hasn’t, and I can see where she went wrong. Very powerful, very powerful indeed.
In the workshops, the workshop idea as we run them is that you are out and about and amongst the students all the time in those groups, seeing what’s going on in the groups, seeing how they’re answering their questions. They have set questions on sheets that they work through in groups and the groups of three just get one set. They’re all working on them together and you’re moving in and out and around among the groups and seeing how they’re going. In that circumstance you can quickly, having looked at three or four of your eight different groups, figure out where a particular issue woul
In the lecture theatre the best strategy there, where you’re confronted by all the constraints of the lecture theatre, is to stop and do stuff with the students, walk around amongst them, see what they’re actually doing... And out of that you might go back and address some aspect of it and revisit it or something like that or you might point them to some tools to use to work out some other aspect. So in the lecture theatre it’s very much for me a case of stopping and going and seeing what they’re doing and if you don’t then clearly you don’t know.
I changed my method of teaching to be a team-based learning approach where in fact as teams they are responsible to each other within the team for their level of engagement or for what they put into that team and if they don’t put in what the team thinks is useful then they get marked on that, their peers mark them on how much they’re contributing to the team’s goals. So rather than me as the educator saying you need to do this and you need to do that, in fact the system is such that as a team they’re responsible for a certain outcome and the team must achieve that outcome and so they need
We all spend a certain amount of our class time going through definitions and jargon and getting students up to speed with the basic area and now that’s material which I take out of the class and put online and let students read and understand that in their own time before they come to the class.
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.
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.
