It’s something that needs to be reinforced, it’s not that you taught it in this unit for three weeks, we are over it. It’s something that keeps coming back, and that you can possibly reintroduce it, with not much change to your teaching. Not every single time, but every now and then remind the students, ‘remember, you still have to think about stoichiometry and limiting reagents’.
It’s really important always to keep going back to links of where they might have seen equilibrium previously, because then they start to get the idea of chemistry topics being interrelated. Even put at the end of each lecture a little problem, for example, ‘how is equilibrium related to acids and bases?’ Even if they don’t understand it yet, just mention it so it’s in the back of their mind when they do learn about that topic.
Always show the corresponding reduction process when discussing oxidation and vice versa. Ask students to think about where electrons are moving to or from.
Keep coming back to the curly arrow concept, in terms of reinforcing it in different contexts. For a first-year course that’s about 20 lectures, introduce the curly arrow concept in lectures four to seven, then revisit it every lecture thereafter. For 13 or 14 lectures, it would come up in some different form - different examples, different ways of using it, referring back to the original concepts, reiterating the vocabulary, the language that's being used.
Re-teach electronegativity quickly because you don't necessarily trust the person who's taught before you. Make sure that it's reiterated, and then follow through to bond polarity and partial charges. Include all of that information first before going on to do reaction mechanisms. So the first thing to do is draw in partial charges to identify the electrophile and the nucleophile before going on to the next step. It's about doing examples all the way from first principles to build up those concepts.
If you teach a course that then goes on to other things like equilibrium, electrochemistry, intermolecular forces etc, make sure that all your equations are balanced. Because it can get very lazy, especially when you’re doing organic chemistry, you don’t bother balancing anything. Coming back to that concept each time is really key for them if they’re going to understand the stoichiometry.
This concept is something that needs to be reinforced. It’s not that you taught it in this unit for three weeks, we are over it. It’s something that keeps coming back, and you can possibly reintroduce it, with not much change to your teaching. Not every single time, but every now and then remind the students, 'Remember, you still have to think about stoichiometry and limiting reagents.'
