Expert Insights

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Strategy

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.	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 use a lot of eye contact. The people in the back row are not anonymous, you know. Make sure you’re talking to them and make sure that you see them.	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.
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.	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.
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.	You could identify people and you use it in a constructive way. But if you could show some identity, that you’re not a remote person up the front, that the big class is not anonymous, it just helps to break down that barrier. And once they trust you and once they like coming, that solves a lot of other problems - behavioural problems, learning problems and so on.
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	When they come in I give a very simple quiz which we do using clickers, the sort of anonymous audience response systems, and I just test a few multiple choice questions, just testing their understanding of some of those terms and then when I notice that there’s, well, anything more than 10 or 15% of students who don’t correctly understand those terms then we go through a process of exploring what those terms are and why they apply to what they apply to and then I retest that a couple of weeks later.... I notice at the end of the year some of the students can lapse back into their old habits, so it’s something that I am going to need to think of continuing to reinforce.

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