Expert Insights

Topic

Strategy

So you shouldn’t be rigid, you shouldn’t be rigid in what you’re going to do. It’s always stunned me that people say you should know where you start a lecture and where you’re going to finish, and if you get to that point and you finish ten minutes early you then should just finish. I’ve never worked on that principle. I never know where I’m going to start because I never know where I’m going to finish, right. So where I finished the lecture before is where I start the next day, I haven’t got a set content. If a student asks me an interesting question and I get the feeling that they want to know that answer I’ll go off for five or ten minutes or three or four minutes answering it, and if I don’t get to the end of where I thought I was going to get to, too bad I’ll do it next time. So you go with the flow, you don’t go with a rigid thing ‘I’ve got to get through these 15 slides today and if I don’t the world will end,’ because it won’t.	At the start of every class my standard thing was ‘can you see me, can you hear me, can you see the slide?’ I would always look up the back for someone to put their hand up and always I would never talk to the front row. I’d always talk middle and back row and if someone was talking in the back row I’d pick them up and say ‘hey you, be quiet’ and then they know that I’ve seen them. So you’ve got to focus on the whole class not just the people at the front - the people at the back as well. Because sometimes smart people sit at the back as well, not just the dummies who want to get out. You’ve got to make sure you know everyone in the class. And the surprising thing is that most kids sit in the same place every lecture. So you can actually recognise where they are and who they are. You don’t know their names but there’s a pattern in the way they sit. You’ve just got to be aware of that. So the trick is to embrace the whole class with your - you know physically, just with your eyes and and the way you talk. You know, when you wave your hands, wave it to the back row. Make sure they’re involved.
It was a revelation to me in second year when [one of the top professors] said to me, "Buy a model kit." And so now I tell all my students.	It’s something that needs to be reinforced, it’s not that you taught it in this unit for three weeks, we are over it. It’s something that keeps coming back, and that you can possibly reintroduce it, with not much change to your teaching. Not every single time, but every now and then remind the students, ‘remember, you still have to think about stoichiometry and limiting reagents’.
The culture in the chemistry department was always lots and lots of content. And that’s changed now because you don’t need it, because they can find it another way, but you’ve got to give them the framework to understand the content.	It is vitally important for their understanding of chemistry that they understand that molecules are three-dimensional things and that they have a spatial requirement in that they have a shape of their own and that shape will change. They can't do higher level manipulations without an understanding of three-dimensional nature of molecules.
They [students] expect to either succeed or fail immediately or very quickly on particular problems. They do not see the process as a learning process.	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 like to approach chemistry as a different language, because it used symbols to convey ideas across, but they are not the reality. When we draw a little stick structure, alcohol does not exist as I’ve just drawn it, it’s a representation.	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.

Pages