Expert Insights

Topic

Strategy

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.	We all spend a certain amount of our class time going through definitions and jargon and getting students up to speed with the basic area and now that’s material which I take out of the class and put online and let students read and understand that in their own time before they come to the class.
Ions and ionic chemistry are essential to life and just about everything they will run across.	I find that some students pick up what the mole concept is from the idea of grouping numbers of things that are every day size.
Many years ago, lecturers only had one style, you know they just wrote on the blackboard, actual blackboard with chalk. That was the only style. They just talked... That’s all I knew so that was fine and so I thought, well I’ll just continue that and the students weren’t understanding what I was saying and explaining and I thought, oh hang on what’s going on here? This is the way I was taught. Come on, it should work. So, yeah I think it would be good if someone told me that at the start, but as I said because I’d end up doing my Diploma of Education that opened my eyes to that and that’s when I started to utilise different strategies and I appreciate that not everyone is going to understand one way of, my teaching way.	So, it’s helping to bed down analysis, problem solving, doing the sort of detective work to get to an answer. And the students also seem to quite enjoy having material presented to them in that way - here’s a spectrum, what do you think the structure is, because it’s a more active form of learning as well. So I find I enjoy teaching it, and they respond well in terms of, they keep coming in and asking me for additional problems to practise on which is clearly evidence that they feel it’s challenging them.
And it’s taken me a long time to discover what sort of teacher I actually am.... I had a colleague who said to me, ‘oh you’re a narrative teacher’. I said, ‘I’m a what’? ..... I tell stories, essentially. I tell stories. I turn everything into a story in some way... and again, analytical chemistry lends itself to that. That you can link it to stories that are in the media, personal experiences, my own personal research experience. The student’s own experience. So it’s shared. So while I thought I was a straight forward didactic teacher, you know I just stood there but I’m not, I asked students, ‘alright who’s got experience of this’, and then I use a narrative form to get that across, and it seems to work.	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 it’s really important that people mark assessments. Mark, and see what the students actually end up knowing. Because they can pretend to themselves that students have understood everything, but if they actually have to mark the exam papers, or the quizzes, or whatever it is, they actually are confronted with the students actual knowledge. I think that’s really influential. The second semester of teaching, when you think you’ve explained things well, and then 90% of the class have not got it, then it’s not the students fault at that point, it’s probably your fault. So I think that assessment is really important. Not only for the students, but also for the marker. I think you can learn a lot from marking.	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.

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