Expert Insights

Topic

Strategy

I don’t like to be in a position where I’m stood at the front talking for 50 minutes. I like to be a in a position where I’m engaging with students, where they’re engaging with each other, where there’s a buzz, where there’s things happening, and it’s an active environment.	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.
[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. You just talk about what is sports drug testing, road side testing, when was the last time you went to the doctor to get a path test. These are all forms of analytical chemistry. So I have a significant advantage over some people [teaching other topics] in being able to imbed it in their experiences. Everybody has some kind of experience we can draw on to say, yeah that’s analytical chemistry. The difficulty is of course to ensure that misconceptions don’t creep in.	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 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.	We teach way too much stuff. We teach way too much stuff that we used to teach because students didn’t have the resources available to them that they’ve got now. I mean if you look at the resources - they’ve got textbooks, they’ve got electronic media, they’ve got Sapling. They can do the problems in their own time in a guided way with something like Sapling. We don’t have to do it, all we’ve got to do is give them the framework to solve the problems. And I think we often misunderstand how much we should give them because I think we underestimate the value of letting them solve problems in a guided way with things like Sapling. And I think, you know, in the old days we’d just do problem after problem after problem, which is as boring as anything.
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.	A lot of it is from colleagues. Conferences are fantastic. You know, your chemical education conferences. I do go to a lot of those.
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 what I try to get students to see is that we use models and you use a model, while it works. Then when it doesn’t work you develop a more sophisticated model, and what we’re doing now is developing a more sophisticated model of the structure of the atom, of bonding between atoms. So they find that difficult, the fact that you’re putting aside the model you used previously and developing a more sophisticated one. I think that’s something, it just knocks their confidence a bit. I think we’ve got to convince them that, actually, what your teachers told you at school wasn't wrong, it’s just that this is more sophisticated, that science is all about building models to explain reality.

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