Creative Chemists

Strategies for Teaching and Learning

Simon Rees, Douglas Newton

• Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839161254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Naturwissenschaften & Technik unterrichten

Creative thinking, be it that of the teacher or the student, has tended to be overlooked in science, but exercising it is important. This book shows how it can be done in chemistry, both in the context of creative chemistry teaching and in learning chemistry.

Going beyond principles and ideology, readers will find practical strategies, tools, examples, and case studies in a variety of contexts to bring creative thinking theory into practice. Beginning with a discussion on the nature of creativity, the authors' debunk misconceptions and address the relationship between creativity and problem solving. Delving into opportunities for practising creative thinking in science, for instance, hypothesis generation and experiment design, the authors' then move on to discussions around assessing and evaluating creative thinking. Further areas covered include: multisensory chemistry, language and literacy, practical work and story-telling.

As a resource, this book points the way to fostering exploration and the development of creative thinking in chemistry for the benefit of the student, and for the benefit of the teacher in offering a source of satisfaction and achievement in the work they do.

With a foreword by John Holman.

CHAPTER 1

Creative Teaching and Creative Students

1.1 Creative Thinking

Creative thinking in the classroom is seen as something to be promoted. Governments see it as a source of economic success, and it has personal value as it confers a certain autonomy on its holder through its potential to help with life's problems. Moreover, the digital revolution is making it possible to automate much that is routine in the workplace (Bakshi et al., 2015). What will be left will be what takes imagination, heuristic thinking, and ‘What if?’ thinking. This is something for which we should prepare our students. Attention tends to focus only on students’ creative competence (e.g.UNESCO, 2001; Shaheen, 2010), but it is also for the teacher (Rinkevich, 2011). Creative thinking, particularly in times of rapid change, makes teaching flexible so it can adapt to new needs and expectations. In a real sense, competence in creative teaching can make teachers future-proof as it helps them change with the times, even when robots appear in the classroom to take over routines. But it does more than that: creative teaching has probably always been worthwhile because it can produce teaching events which enhance learning. If the world and its students were always the same, then teaching might be a routine of recycled lessons. But no class is exactly like another, and expectations are always changing, so teaching is often better if it takes note of this. Creative thinking is as much for the teacher as for the student. Here, we aim to illustrate both aspects of creative thinking, that of the student and that of the teacher. But first, we need to set out what we mean by creative thinking.

There are many definitions of creative behaviour, but they tend to agree that its main component is the construction of something more or less new, novel or original (Acar et al., 2017; Said-Meturaly et al., 2017). Simply producing something new, novel or original, however, is not enough otherwise any crazy idea would do. In addition, it also has to be somehow appropriate, fit for purpose, useful, or of value (NACCCE, 1999; Runco et al., 2005). In addition, it helps if it is also somehow satisfying. Exactly what original, appropriate, and satisfying mean depends on the context.

1.2 Being Creative in Chemistry

The creative teaching of chemistry is clearly not the same as students thinking creatively about chemistry. Creative teaching is when a teacher applies imagination to produce novel approaches with the intention of making students’ learning more interesting and effective. These approaches must be in some way novel to the teacher, but not necessarily novel to the world – it is conceivable that, a thousand miles away, another teacher is teaching in the same way. What is important is that the approach is appropriate in the sense that it has some promise of achieving its goal. If, at the same time, it is satisfyingly economical in terms of effort, time and resources, all the better.

Fostering students’ creative thinking in chemistry aims to have students produce explanations or ideas that are novel to them, and, at the same time, appropriate in the sense that they are scientifically plausible. If those ideas are also concise or parsimonious, or otherwise cognitively economical, all the better (Rosch, 1999). Teaching which deliberately offers opportunities for students to practise their own creative thinking in chemistry is aimed at developing students’ competence in it (Jeffrey and Craft, 2004; Rinkevich, 2011).

It is possible to have creative teaching without exercising students’ creative thinking. For instance, a teacher may construct a novel way of teaching the arrangement of the Periodic Table after which the students are able to produce the table faultlessly from memory. Equally, there can be students’ creative thought without creative teaching: a routine lesson about the Periodic Table may prompt students to reflect in a ‘What if?’ way about the chemical nature of non-carbon based life. Creative teaching and students’ creative thinking, however, are both valuable aspects of chemistry education which offer benefits for both students and their teachers, and they can be mutually supportive. Creative teaching can be deliberately aimed at stimulating creative thinking, and, in the process, reap rewards which are greater than either alone. We begin with some thoughts about creative teaching and what it can do.

1.3 Creative Teaching in Chemistry

Creative teaching can produce rewards for the both teacher and student. Not least amongst these, creative teaching can:

• prevent teaching being seen by students as irrelevant, boring, or outmoded, and hence
  • attract and retain STEM students (Holbrook, 2005);
  • offer teaching which is tuned to the particular students in front of you in order to engage them effectively and, so, enhance their learning (Darby, 2005; Gibson, 2010).
• prevent teaching becoming a tedious treadmill of transmitted information, and hence
  • maintain teachers’ own interest in their subject and its teaching (Craft et al., 2014);
  • enhance job satisfaction;
  • maintain the teachers’ enthusiasm, and through emotional contagion, enhance the emotional climate of the classroom and engagement in learning (Newton, 2014);
  • enable a teacher to adapt effectively to changing needs, expectations, and subject content, and, in effect, possess a competence which future-proofs them.

How are these rewards to be achieved? One way is to see the subject from the student's perspective, in particular, to ask: What is in it for them? (Craft et al., 2014). The temptation can be to point to the practical utility of the topic, but this can be self-defeating as some knowledge has little obvious or immediate utility but opens the way to later learning. Instead, the question to ask is: What are the students’ psychological needs that studying this topic will satisfy? For instance, these might be the satisfaction of curiosity, a need to feel competent, a need to understand the world and one's place in it, and a need to affiliate with others. Relating the topic to the students’ needs is what can make it relevant in the eyes of the student. Science has tended to purge its teaching of people, possibly to reflect or emphasise the objective nature of the subject, or, perhaps, those who teach it (Newton, 1988). But, putting people, individually and collectively, back into what is taught can help students relate to and see the relevance of a topic. This is where imaginative, creative thought helps a teacher literally bring a topic to life, and do so without selling short the topic in hand. This might be achieved in a variety of ways. For instance, some have had success using drama, ontological questioning and collaborative activities (Pollard et al., 2018).

Seeing the subject through the students’ eyes also means deliberately planning to support emotional needs, like interest. A teacher's enthusiasm can attract interest and attention as students look for the source of enthusiasm. (Of course, excessive enthusiasm can be a source of amusement, rather than an attraction, and interest will die away if relevance does not become evident.) Pollard et al., (2018) have pointed to the engaging nature of surprise. This does not mean that the surprise must always come from what has been called Whizz-Bang chemistry – students may remember the whizzes and bangs but not the chemistry – but, for example, it can be more muted and felt as the pleasure at finding a novel way of solving a problem. Needing to feel secure, and feeling able to offer an idea or make mistakes without fear of ridicule, are also states which support cognitive engagement in learning (Darby, 2005).

Such approaches can catch students’ interest, engage them in thinking, make learning more memorable and durable, motivate students to want more, and enhance their attainment: all are valuable outcomes of the teacher's creative efforts. These efforts may be usefully directed at any kind of purposeful thinking in chemistry. In this context, purposeful thinking is aimed at achieving particular academic ends, often to develop knowledge, know-how, and thinking habits, and ranges from memorising information to higher level mental activity, like evaluative or critical thinking. (There is a tendency to deride so-called ‘lower’ level thinking, like memorising, but all domains contain information which may usefully be committed to memory; the problem comes when students try to commit everything to memory – as when cramming for examinations – when we want them to develop competence in other kinds of purposeful thought.) Kinds of purposeful thinking which creative teaching could support include:

• memorising
  • as when learning the symbol used to indicate a poisonous substance, or that there is a limit to the amount of a substance which will dissolve in water, or that chlorine is a green, diatomic gas which can purify water, and mercury is a metallic element of atomic number 80 and symbol Hg;
• deducing
  • as when a chemical equation is made to balance, a molecular formula is deduced in analytical chemistry, reaction pathways are inferred in complex chemical systems, or when the soil's pH is deduced from the colour of certain plant foliage;
• understanding
  • as when grasping the notion of permanent and temporary changes, or chemical bonding, or knowing why chlorine can purify water, or why buckminsterfullerene has properties not usual amongst other materials, or how the elements in the groups of the Periodic Table relate to one another, or constructing an analogy;
• creative thinking
  • as when Dalton proposed that, ultimately, matter comprised indivisible, discrete particles, and that those of the same element are identical. More recently, as when the concept of lock and key was constructed to explain biomolecular recognition, and the as yet unsolved problem of constructing a material which usefully superconducts electricity at room temperature;
• evaluative and critical thinking
  • as when evaluating the plausibility of a claim or belief such as, if wine is left to evaporate, the alcohol in it will become more concentrated, or considering the adequacy of an experiment to test a tentative explanation, or the strength of the evidence for a conclusion.

We are expected to help students of all ages exercise these kinds of purposeful thinking (Newton and Newton, 2018). Economy of effort, the shadow of examinations, and time pressures may incline some students and their teachers to focus on some of these more than others. One that can be overlooked is students’ creative thinking. This is not so say that other kinds are not important: there can be no creative thinking without them (Newton, 2014; Hirsch, 2017).

Of course, creative teaching need not end here. Chemistry teachers put creative effort into constructing new programmes and new approaches, and these sometimes fit the current and anticipated needs of science education so well that they may be the basis of an invigorating reformulation of science teaching. As with many such ideas, the constraints of the classroom and prescribed schemes of work can make the creation easier than its adoption, but it can and does happen from time to time.

1.4 Students Thinking Creatively in Chemistry

In science, highly regarded creative thinking is generally seen as being:

• original;
• plausible or appropriate, according to context;
• parsimonious or cognitively economical.

Of these, the first two are generally essential and the last is desirable or welcome (Newton, 2016). Popularly, there is a tendency to attach the word ‘creative’ to the arts as though the arts have the monopoly on creative activity. Of course, there is creative thinking in domains like the sciences and mathematics, although it may appear under the guise of non-algorithmic problem solving (Claxton, 2006).

Creative thinking, and its twin, problem solving, can be seen as constructing personal understandings (Newton, 2012). In the classroom, the construction of an understanding often means bringing together new information, making connections within it, and relating it to prior knowledge to give a functional model of some aspect of the world. This mental model, however, is generally what is approved by others (the teacher, the textbook, and chemists collectively). When creative thinking brings together seemingly unrelated ideas, the understanding that results may be novel. The writer, Arthur Koestler, described this process as bi-sociation (Koestler, 2017). It is facilitated by the imagination, a mental activity which allows play with seemingly disparate ideas in a ‘What if?’ way to produce alternative worlds. In a sense, understanding lies at one end of a spectrum while at the other is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Creative Teaching and Creative Students
• Chapter 2 Creative Thinking
• Chapter 3 Multisensory Learning
• Chapter 4 Cultural Chemistry
• Chapter 5 Constructing and Representing Understandings in Chemistry
• Chapter 6 Storytelling
• Chapter 7 Performance and Drama
• Chapter 8 Practical Chemistry
• Chapter 9 The Language of Chemistry
• Chapter 10 Assessing Creativity
• Chapter 11 Why Creativity Matters
• Subject Index