Expert Insights

Topic

Strategy

It always seems like we're starting from further behind than a lot of the other sciences are because they seem to know less about chemistry when they get here. If I say ‘think of a famous physicist’ you probably already have thought of three. Then you could go outside and ask someone to think of a famous physicist and they'd probably think of at least one of the same ones. You do the same thing with biologists. If I say to think of a famous chemist … that's within chemistry circles, we can't do it. We can name one but you know if you go out there and say, ‘Who is this person?’ they've got no idea. So for some reason … we've never … chemists have never been able to popularise our topic, our content. We've never been able to make it exciting enough that someone who is not studying it still wants to know about it. And so I do think we've got a bigger challenge, for whatever reason. Maybe there's something about chemistry that makes it less enjoyable, I don’t know. There's definitely been an ongoing issue for us that it's not … people just don't know anything about it... Most people know Einstein's theory of relativity. You don't see that really in everyday, go, "There's the theory of relativity at work." Newton's Law, sure, you see those and you … but, yeah, everybody knows Einstein. And a lot of … I'll call them lay people, I don't like the term, but non-science people, could probably give you a hand wave explanation of what the theory of relativity is about, which is a pretty abstract thing. I mean, if we think of the equivalent types of things in chemistry that are that abstract, nobody has a clue. We teach them in third year to the remaining hard core people that are left.	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.
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’.	Students should [only] be limited by students' curiosity.
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.	And it’s taken me a long time to discover what sort of teacher I actually am.... I had a colleague who said to me, ‘oh you’re a narrative teacher’. I said, ‘I’m a what’? ..... I tell stories, essentially. I tell stories. I turn everything into a story in some way... and again, analytical chemistry lends itself to that. That you can link it to stories that are in the media, personal experiences, my own personal research experience. The student’s own experience. So it’s shared. So while I thought I was a straight forward didactic teacher, you know I just stood there but I’m not, I asked students, ‘alright who’s got experience of this’, and then I use a narrative form to get that across, and it seems to work.
I find that some students pick up what the mole concept is from the idea of grouping numbers of things that are every day size.	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.
Students from high school might understand that vinegar for example is a weak acid compared to hydrochloric acid, but they never knew why. And you could then show them that with equilibrium, this is why. And all of a sudden they’re, 'oh, I’ve always known that I shouldn’t spill HCL on my hand, but I can spill vinegar on my hand and put it on my fish and chips'... Those sorts of moments can really... the students go ‘oh wow.’ Anonymous	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.

Pages