Students should [only] be limited by students' curiosity.
Expert Insights
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And it’s so essential, if you are in the middle of a discipline, to have a really well developed sense of what your colleagues around you are teaching, so that you can make connections. |
When you think of things in terms of energy you can represent energy … energy can be modelled as a particle, as matter. It can be modelled using waves and then trying to talk about how we would use each model as it's appropriate for a particular situation. It's the sort of things we observe might dictate which model we use to explain it, by recognising that in each case there is another model but perhaps just not as useful. So maybe it goes back to just trying to show that everything that we do is a model, every model has its upside and its downside and that we usually only use a model that’s as detailed as it needs to be for the particular concept that you're trying to get across. If you want to get across a concept of a car to someone who has never seen a car you don't probably show them a Ferrari or a drag racing car. Maybe you show them a Lego style block and we do the same thing with our scientific models as well. I guess trying to get across that idea that this is the model that we're going to use but it can be a lot more complicated. I don't want you to think it's as simple as this but it's appropriate under the circumstance. So I guess I spend a lot of time talking about things as models when I'm talking about quantum mechanics. Our treatment in the first year, which is where I cover it, a little bit of second year but I don't take a mathematical detail treatment of quantum mechanics. Someone else does that, so I really bow to them. So most of mine is non-mathematical, just simple mathematics and mainly conceptual type of stuff. I guess some of the things I try and do to illustrate the differences between the models and the way that we use them is to ask questions in class that might be postulated in such a way that you can't answer it if you're thinking about both models at the same time. So the one I like is where I show say a 2s orbital and the probability distribution of that node in between. I talk about things that … there's one briefly, this plum pudding model which they all laugh about. When you look at this 2s model there is a probability and a high probability, relatively so, that the electron can be inside the nucleus, if you think about it in particle terms. Then talk about the nodes and so on and how they arise in quantum mechanics and so on and then ask questions like if the electron can be here and here but it can never be here how does it get there? ... I try and get across maybe the bigger picture, everything we're going to do from this point on (because we do this fairly early in first year) - everything is going to be a model. Nothing is going to be right. Nothing is going to be wrong. Nothing is going to be exactly the way it is. Everything will be just a model. You'll hear us saying things like ‘this is how it is’ or ‘this is what's happening’. But really you need to interpret that as ‘this is a model and this is how this model is used to explain this particular phenomenon. |
This understanding builds students' knowledge about the basic structure of matter which stimulates them to think in sub-microscopic level that provides the fundamental understanding for further chemistry learning. |
Many years ago, lecturers only had one style, you know they just wrote on the blackboard, actual blackboard with chalk. That was the only style. They just talked... That’s all I knew so that was fine and so I thought, well I’ll just continue that and the students weren’t understanding what I was saying and explaining and I thought, oh hang on what’s going on here? This is the way I was taught. Come on, it should work. So, yeah I think it would be good if someone told me that at the start, but as I said because I’d end up doing my Diploma of Education that opened my eyes to that and that’s when I started to utilise different strategies and I appreciate that not everyone is going to understand one way of, my teaching way. |
[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. |
We do an awful lot of focus on teaching but realisticly, authentic assessment that actually engages the student, that’s a tougher ask... I set a lot of essay type assignments. I think we ought to do more of that in science. But when I started doing this I used to get very poor results and it’s taken me a little while to realise that the students weren’t understanding what the questions was. They didn’t understand what I meant by compare and contrast or discuss or argue for this. So increasingly now I use workshops to actually spend time with the students unpacking, what is this essay assignment about? What am I actually asking you to do? What do you need to think about? And not assuming that they know how to write an essay. |
I think to get the students to straight away mark for somebody else what they’ve just done and then to mark or take part in the marking of two other versions of the same thing is really powerful. So it’s not so much me directly finding out what they do and don’t understand but using methods by which they can diagnose for themselves. I haven’t got this, she has, or yep I have got most of that, she hasn’t, and I can see where she went wrong. Very powerful, very powerful indeed. |
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. |
Chemistry is a different language so I try to approach it that way by explaining the ideas behind symbols. |