Expert Insights

I started lecturing before I did my Diploma of Education and I would have recommended to all of the lecturers to do it because it really helped me in my teaching.  Mind you, I already had a bit of experience, I don’t know, you know, the chicken or the egg type thing.

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

Ions and ionic chemistry are essential to life and just about everything they will run across.

A lot of it is from colleagues.  Conferences are fantastic.  You know, your chemical education conferences.  I do go to a lot of those.

So the first thing that I really stress that people do, is that they actually go and watch some classes.  I think that’s the most important thing.  When they’re coming straight out of a post doc, or they’re coming straight out of the Research Centre, and then, they’re told they’re going to be lecturing 300 first year students, they’ve got to go and sit in the back of the lecture theatres for a few weeks.... when I came over from the UK to here, and the class sizes are about three or four times as big, it was just a real help to be able to see what worked and didn’t work  – how little time the students were on task in quite a few lectures.  Where the lecturer would just be talking and be oblivious to this.  I think people just learn a lot by seeing good things, but they also learn a lot by seeing quite bad things going on.

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 was thinking about Le Chatelier’s principle and how that’s quite cumbersome in its wording, and so when I teach it, and how I always break that down into language that’s probably easier for students to understand, and Bob tells me that’s called repackaging, and I sort of thought that through all my teaching I do a fair bit of repackaging, a lot of the time, so I guess that was just a trait that I use and has been pretty successful for me, I think.

The culture in the chemistry department was always lots and lots of content.  And that’s changed now because you don’t need it, because they can find it another way, but you’ve got to give them the framework to understand the content.

You're learning a new language as well as new concepts. There's lots of vocab, so terms like electrophile and nucleophile and many others. So learning the language, learning the code that we use, the curly arrow code, and then starting to apply that in half a dozen or a dozen or so different contexts, different reactions.

Chemistry is a different language so I try to approach it that way by explaining the ideas behind symbols.

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