Are you looking for teaching ideas for Chemistry for the IB Diploma? Then take a look at our blog post from experienced teacher and author Dr Steve Owen. Dr Owen is an author from our Chemistry for the IB Diploma series. In his blog post, Dr Owen looks at how to support and stretch students for Chemistry for the IB Diploma, the importance of practice and variety in lessons, applications of chemistry to everyday life, the importance of a questioning mindset as well as how to encourage critical thinking.
You can listen to Dr Owen discussing these ideas with fellow author and teacher David Martindill in our Brighter Thinking Podcast episode on stretch and support in upper secondary science. You can read David’s latest blog post here.
Dr Steve Owen
How do we support students in IB Chemistry?
One of the main things here is clearly explaining the concepts. At this level, most of the concepts can be fairly easily broken down into a few basic principles, such as positive charges attract negative charges, negative repels negative and systems tend to move to lower energy. The more students can understand and not just think that they must rely on learning things by rote, the easier the subject becomes.
Practice is vital
Once the students understand the basics, practice is essential. The ‘Test your understanding’ questions in the coursebook are provided for students to practise on each individual aspect of the topic. Then the exam-style questions give them an opportunity to challenge themselves to put everything together at the end of the topic.
Variety is key
The more variety you can bring into lessons, the more exciting and interesting the lessons become. Chemistry has a huge number of opportunities to bring an extra dimension into your teaching. Illustrating principles with demonstrations of chemical reactions, laboratory work and building molecular models are all great ways to keep students interested. Some of these require extra equipment and chemicals, but you can also make do with very little, for example passing a ball (an electron!) to a student to show what a reducing agent is. Or, getting pairs of students to hold both hands to make ethene molecules and then opening out one of their hands to join to the next pair is an entertaining way of illustrating addition polymerisation. Other things I tend to do include charging up a ruler by rubbing it on my jumper and using it to bend a stream of water to show the polar nature of water, or charging up a balloon and sticking it to a wall to get students to start thinking about induced charges when I am explaining London forces.
Applications of chemistry to everyday life
Chemistry is inherently interesting but a lot of students like relating reactions and principles to things that they are familiar with from everyday life. The ‘Science in context’ feature throughout the coursebook provides lots of examples of these. Environmental issues are upmost in many people’s minds at the moment, and many of the features are linked to these. The ‘Science in context’ feature should provide a good basis for classroom discussion or an opportunity to encourage students to do some further research.
Stretching students
Chemistry is a difficult subject, but it is always a balance between giving students an appreciation of this and scaring them off if they think that chemistry is too difficult. It is good to throw in the occasional exception to the general rule, for example, the H-Te-H bond angle in H2Te is 90o, or when explaining transition metal colours, show them a solution containing the dichromate(VI) ion, which is brightly coloured, but what is the oxidation state of chromium? How many d electrons does it have? Be careful though – too many exceptions and students can lose sight of the over-arching principles.
Believe nothing, question everything
It is important to get students to question what they are learning and for them to understand things in their own way. Encourage students to go away and think about what they have covered in a lesson – does it make sense, are there any flaws in the argument?
Encourage critical thinking
There are lots of examples that could be used from everyday life, for example, is aluminium better than plastic for making water bottles? How do we know that a particular climactic event is linked to global warming? If DDT is so bad for the environment, why is it still being used?
