Throw in pop quizzes when you discuss a concept and then give an example and give them a few minutes to work through that example. That's moving towards a partially flipped classroom context. Also use worksheets to give an increased level of formalisation to it.
A topic like this is quite theoretical and if you approach it in a very didactic way, it can be very dry. It’s undoubtedly quite abstract, and if you present it in a fairly traditional way it’s even more so. Try to engage students with it, and get them to think and discuss and use different approaches. Coming at it from different ways helps to bring it alive a bit.
Particularly for the VSEPR theory, models of any kind are great. Tell the students, 'Buy a model kit.' Because it has to be something three-dimensional. They need to bring their own models in so they can do it themselves.
When teaching electronic configuration, if it's a small class you can get each student in the class to be an electron. They can arrange themselves in different directions. It's really good if you've got steps in your classroom because you can demonstrate going up in energy. They face towards the front or the back of the room. If you simply tell them to think about parallel and antiparallel spins they come up with that themselves and it's really good when you can say, 'Yes, you came up with that yourselves.'
Use the units to check that they’ve actually done the right calculation. The other thing is when they’ve got the mole concept and they’re applying it, try to get students to do an estimation of the answer. So are they estimating something that’s very large?
They’re stepping into an area where they must do calculations and they must support them with strictly mathematical algebra, so that when they’re doing calculations it’s clear what the data is and what the units are and how these all fit together to make up the calculation they’re doing. So it’s really about making things mathematically strict.
In the lab you can get students to weigh out quantities and react them and then do calculations for the yield, so they’re applying it. That’s the way in which they come to terms with what they’re actually doing and the molar basis for that. It’s about representing what’s going on, on a molecular basis. We handle things on a molar basis because they’re the amounts we can weigh, and it’s representative of what’s going on on the molecular scale. It’s just scaled up by 6 x 1023.
