Put a picture of Le Chatelier and the quote of what he said and get them all to write down what they think that means and then let them talk in groups of three and all form a new idea of what they think it means. And then a few lectures later come back and ask them to do it again. Get them to submit their definitions so you can see how their understanding evolves and discuss it in class.
If a student comes to you with a fundamental misunderstanding, try to sit with them one-on-one if you can, and try to find out what their problem is and try to help them. Always try to be open, always try to be available. That’s very difficult in first year, due to the large number of students, but just try to help people. Be honest and open.
If you look at the resources - students’ have textbooks, they have electronic media, they have Sapling. They can do the problems in their own time in a guided way with something like Sapling. All we as lecturers have to do is give them the framework to solve the problems. If you set up the framework for them and let them go away and use that framework and learn how to solve problems they’ll teach themselves. So it’s a matter of giving them that framework and it’s the buffers that are the framework of it all.
Ask the students to look at structures and consider what charge different parts of the molecules will have when they are protonated and deprotonated (eg. COOH to COO- is neutral to negative, and NH3+ to NH2 is positive to neutral, but can have OH groups that become O- sometimes, depending on the pKa). Use a table of amino acid structures and pKa values, and get them to work out charges at the pH of interest.
Use two screens in a lecture and then turn one off and go to the visualiser and spend time on the visualiser drawing things or solving problems or writing something. And at that point the class becomes engaged. So when you’re using PowerPoint, unless you’re really good with it, they’ll disengage. If you start writing and drawing structures and things on the visualiser, they start doing it and then it becomes much more interactive - they’re working from the visualiser then they’re back to the PowerPoint and then back to the visualiser again.
Use small group student-centred interaction using structured work sheets that logically develop students' conceptual understanding. It’s a learning cycle approach.
Photocopy the problems rather than expecting students to download them from Blackboard, and take in only a few copies so that students have to share. They’re forced to work together. But that causes a problem at the end of the class if they all want their own copy, so you then have to go back and load it up onto Blackboard. But that sort of approach works quite well.
Get the students to present the solutions to NMR problems, with a bit of assistance. Point to a signal on the spectrum and say ‘have you thought about what that means?’ Give them some hints. Encourage the students themselves to be asking the questions about what the signals are or why you ignored a particular signal.
Try to encourage active learning in the lecture theatre. Talk about a concept and then ask them to look at some examples and work through them on their own.
