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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.	The influence has been to stand back and let the students do the learning, rather than for the teacher to be barnstorming them with teaching.
I started lecturing before I did my Diploma of Education and I would have recommended to all of the lecturers to do it because it really helped me in my teaching. Mind you, I already had a bit of experience, I don’t know, you know, the chicken or the egg type thing.	I think we’ve all sat in lectures and gone, that was dreadful, so we learned quite a lot from understanding how not to do it as well as how actually to do it. And of course the key is preparation and organisation..... whenever I go into a class knowing that I am beautifully organised, that gives you that extra confidence to project and to present, and you come away with that feeling that you know that the class has gone well and you’ve got the information across to the students in the way that you wanted.
They [students] reveal great misunderstandings about the molecular world. So the difficulties and limitations are as a result of not spending sufficient time on getting them to think about this world, and spending too much time on doing. You know, we’ve got to spend some time, but you can’t spend too much time, I think, on a lot of the ideas that we do teach, and doing calculations and things that, really, no one else does. It’s really something that’s done almost like it’s make-work-type stuff.	The concept of a continuum is, I think, really important in chemistry and… what I see is that students come up with this issue of things being black or white. They struggle with this concept of the in between stuff.
I think it’s a key teaching topic, also because it’s teaching students to look at data and to interpret data, to assess which part of that data is going to get them to the answer and which part is exquisite detail that they can come back to later on.	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.
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.	So my approach to teaching is that I want students to be actively engaged with the material throughout the lectures, all the tutorials, all the workshops or whatever, and so I’m not giving didactic lectures, I’m not using lots of PowerPoint slides. I’m giving them information. I’m describing things to them, but then I give them lots of examples and lots of things to do, lots of activities to do.

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