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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 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.
Students should [only] be limited by students' curiosity.	Difficulties are having to relearn something that they thought was true from school and not understanding the evolving nature of science. New knowledge is easier to assimilate than changing old knowledge.
I guess what every educator deals with is needing to find out what preconceptions there are at the start of the unit and then correct those and then keep on top of those throughout the course. For example I get students who use the word particle and the word droplet interchangeably. Whereas to an expert, a particle is something that is made of a solid material and a droplet is something that’s a liquid material. Students use those interchangeably so they may be talking about a suspension of solid materials but then they use the word droplet because they think it’s interchangeable with the word particle. Or vice versa, they might be talking about an emulsion and they talk about particles where they should be talking about droplets. So because they’ve heard these phrases before in first year... the importance of using exactly correct terminology hasn’t been reinforced.	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.
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.	So the first thing that I really stress that people do, is that they actually go and watch some classes. I think that’s the most important thing. When they’re coming straight out of a post doc, or they’re coming straight out of the Research Centre, and then, they’re told they’re going to be lecturing 300 first year students, they’ve got to go and sit in the back of the lecture theatres for a few weeks.... when I came over from the UK to here, and the class sizes are about three or four times as big, it was just a real help to be able to see what worked and didn’t work – how little time the students were on task in quite a few lectures. Where the lecturer would just be talking and be oblivious to this. I think people just learn a lot by seeing good things, but they also learn a lot by seeing quite bad things going on.
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.	The actual curly arrow mechanisms are in a way themselves cartoons, how they map to the reality in the way that a Micky Mouse might map to real life.

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