Expert Insights

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Strategy

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.	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.
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.	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.
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 find it [teaching] enjoyable, and I think that if you’re enjoying teaching something then your passion and desire and enjoyment gets transmitted to the students. It’s not necessarily easy to teach, but it’s satisfying and generally we want to inspire them to increase their level of intrinsic motivation to want to continue to study chemistry.
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.	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 for a lot of people, before they started chemistry, especially if they haven't done any chemistry before, they've got no real understanding of the difference between macroscopic things and microscopic and atomic sized things. We all know how important that distinction is.	A lot of it is from colleagues. Conferences are fantastic. You know, your chemical education conferences. I do go to a lot of those.

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