Excellence in teaching

Khim Harris is a lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, where he teaches the Introductory & Biological Chemistry 130. He is also a tutor and supervisor in the Graduate School of Education, where he is involved in the Graduate Diploma in Education programme. He received an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1997 for the Best Coursework Unit in the Faculty of Science.

Introductory and Biological Chemistry 130 is designed for students with no background in chemistry who wish to achieve a first-year university level of chemistry in order to study biological or agricultural science. Because of this lack of chemistry knowledge by the students, and because of the large amount of material which has to be presented in a very short time, I have developed some specific teaching strategies for this course. They are all based on the principle that

"To learn, students simply have to listen; but to understand, students must be made to think."

Listed below are some of these strategies.

Teaching

• Lectures are made interactive by posing questions and encouraging students to give their answers in the lecture theatre.

• Material is presented in lectures in a logical and progressive manner, so that a picture is slowly built, emphasising the links between the previous concept and the next.

• Models and analogies are used to explain difficult concepts, e.g. I use ham sandwiches (with real ham and bread!) to illustrate the idea of limiting reagents in chemistry.

• Concept maps are used to create links from one topic to the next, and Venn diagrams are drawn to emphasise interrelationships between ideas.

• Practical tasks are linked to content in lectures: the laboratory each week is made up of exercises and tasks which involve the theoretical ideas of the previous weeks’ lectures.

Learning

• Students’ prior knowledge is always taken into account so that each new piece of information is linked to what the student already knows.

• Open-ended questions are used in lectures and laboratories to stimulate thinking and creative thought.

• Experimental instructions are always linked to purpose, and specific thinking tasks are associated with each practical task.

• Laboratory questions constantly ask students to predict, observe and explain.

• Students are shown how to translate notes into graphs or tables to assist in their revision.

My lectures, laboratories and tutorials are characterised by the constant use of questions which force students to stop and think about what is being taught. This constant pausing to check on understanding ensures that students only progress to the next concept when they have successfully mastered the material already presented. In this way, learning becomes a much more interactive process between the teacher and the student, and student thought is stimulated rather than just mindless memorisation, an approach to learning which is so common in science education.

I hope that some of these methods might work for you.