Expert Insights

Topic

Strategy

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.	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.
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.	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.
So into the lectures I put kind of ad breaks, I suppose, short 'meet the scientist' breaks. So we would have a photograph and fun facts about a scientist and various places we would have a stop, and I have told them that all of that information wasn't on the exam, so they knew that they could stop and just take a breather and then pick back up on the chemistry afterwards. So that, I think helped, especially the ones that were just finding it all a bit kind of overwhelming.	It was a revelation to me in second year when [one of the top professors] said to me, "Buy a model kit." And so now I tell all my students.
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.	But if you’re honest, they’ll be honest right. And I think that’s really important. If you b*gger something up and you really do make a blue or even a little blue, tell them. Say ‘oh look this was wrong, you know this is what it should be’. So that’s important - to be honest, to be upfront. Recognise that we’re dealing, in 2015 or 2014, we’re dealing with OP1 to maybe 14. Recognise the breadth of that class. Don’t teach the top, don’t teach the bottom, teach somewhere in the middle, but try to make sure that you don’t lose the top ones and lose the bottom ones, which is very difficult to do and you only do it with experience.
When you think of things in terms of energy you can represent energy … energy can be modelled as a particle, as matter. It can be modelled using waves and then trying to talk about how we would use each model as it's appropriate for a particular situation. It's the sort of things we observe might dictate which model we use to explain it, by recognising that in each case there is another model but perhaps just not as useful. So maybe it goes back to just trying to show that everything that we do is a model, every model has its upside and its downside and that we usually only use a model that’s as detailed as it needs to be for the particular concept that you're trying to get across. If you want to get across a concept of a car to someone who has never seen a car you don't probably show them a Ferrari or a drag racing car. Maybe you show them a Lego style block and we do the same thing with our scientific models as well. I guess trying to get across that idea that this is the model that we're going to use but it can be a lot more complicated. I don't want you to think it's as simple as this but it's appropriate under the circumstance. So I guess I spend a lot of time talking about things as models when I'm talking about quantum mechanics. Our treatment in the first year, which is where I cover it, a little bit of second year but I don't take a mathematical detail treatment of quantum mechanics. Someone else does that, so I really bow to them. So most of mine is non-mathematical, just simple mathematics and mainly conceptual type of stuff. I guess some of the things I try and do to illustrate the differences between the models and the way that we use them is to ask questions in class that might be postulated in such a way that you can't answer it if you're thinking about both models at the same time. So the one I like is where I show say a 2s orbital and the probability distribution of that node in between. I talk about things that … there's one briefly, this plum pudding model which they all laugh about. When you look at this 2s model there is a probability and a high probability, relatively so, that the electron can be inside the nucleus, if you think about it in particle terms. Then talk about the nodes and so on and how they arise in quantum mechanics and so on and then ask questions like if the electron can be here and here but it can never be here how does it get there? ... I try and get across maybe the bigger picture, everything we're going to do from this point on (because we do this fairly early in first year) - everything is going to be a model. Nothing is going to be right. Nothing is going to be wrong. Nothing is going to be exactly the way it is. Everything will be just a model. You'll hear us saying things like ‘this is how it is’ or ‘this is what's happening’. But really you need to interpret that as ‘this is a model and this is how this model is used to explain this particular phenomenon.	Chemistry is a different language so I try to approach it that way by explaining the ideas behind symbols.

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