Excellent Advice for Chemistry Teachers

 The WA 2022 ATAR course examination report for Chemistry offers some excellent advice for all teachers of chemistry,

"Teach general concepts from first principles so that students can apply concepts to unfamiliar situations, not just write everything they know."

If you had shown this to me in 2019, I would have been shocked to think that any chemistry teacher wasn't teaching concepts from first principles, but COVID19 really did fundamentally change the way teachers were forced to teach, and how students were forced to study. "Remote learning" encouraged a return to the "bad-old-days" of rote learning "facts" and "how-to"s as a means to obtaining an end (success in exams). Unfortunately, once these electronic measures had been put in place (rather hurriedly in most cases), nobody seems to want to revisit this hasty construct and replace it with something better. There is a huge opportunity here to begin teaching chemistry as a science, using the scientific method, but no, we continue to teach students how to answer exam questions.

This is not education, it is training. And it is training of the worst kind since the ability to answer exam questions is not very useful in the workforce or in adult life.

Heed the advice, "Teach general concepts from first principles so that students can apply concepts to unfamiliar situations", and bad training becomes great education.