What makes a good teacher?

A team of researchers investigated and analysed teaching strategies used by tertiary chemistry educators, and created a searchable website using the data. The researchers, led by Madeleine Schultz at the Queensland University of Technology, intend their website to be a starting point for tertiary chemistry teachers to improve their teaching using others’ strategies. As many of the topics are also found in ages 16–18 school curricula in the UK, the site should be interesting for secondary chemistry teachers.

Madeleine’s team adapted a tool that has been used extensively to collate secondary teachers’ professional knowledge in order to probe tertiary teachers’ understanding of their practice. The tool is known as Loughran’s CoRe (Content Representation). In a series of workshops, the team asked tertiary chemistry educators from 25 different institutions in Australia questions relating to a big idea in chemistry they taught. Their questions probed: why participants thought the idea was important for students to learn; what participants knew about their students’ thinking on the idea and how it influenced their teaching; and how they would find out their students’ grasp of the material. They also asked about the strategies educators used, their reasons for choosing them and their source.

Data from the workshops generated the online database of 300 teaching strategies, searchable by 19 topics typically covered in introductory chemistry courses. The data also provided insight into the processes behind participants’ design of their teaching. The researchers found the approaches described by participants parallel to those already known to be used by secondary chemistry teachers.

Effective teaching made explicit

One motivation for the study, and for creating the database, was to assist tertiary teachers’ professional development. While tertiary teachers will typically have deep subject knowledge, this depth may be restricted to the specialist field of their PhD. Their weaker understanding of sub-disciplinary areas outside their specialism may be problematic when teaching first-year level topics.

Additionally, tertiary educators are not explicitly trained in pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Subject, or content, knowledge is the raw knowledge of chemistry and its concepts, and pedagogical knowledge is knowledge of the theories of teaching and learning. PCK bridges the two and includes aspects, such as representations, analogies and explanations, that characterise effective teaching in a particular discipline. The workshop experience itself impacted positively on teaching practice; many participants were considering PCK and expressing teaching strategies for the first time.

Interest in PCK appears to be growing, as is recognition that its development is a key factor in a teacher moving from novice to expert. Much of the research so far has been at school level.