Teaching
Philosophy
I’m passionate about education, access to information, and its power for social progress. I pride myself on a good presentation with clear slides and an incisive message. I am very excited about the potential of digital technologies in teaching. My research specialisation is in physical chemistry, and I have taught diverse science subjects at university and high school levels. I find satisfaction in insightful teaching, encouraging students to nurture intuitive chemical perspective and rigorous scientific reasoning. Student assessment forms and feedback demonstrate their engagement and value gained from my lessons. I aim for students to comprehend a productive theoretical model they can use to reinforce their confidence in seeing how experiment and data fit their knowledge, rather than rote learning disjointed facts.
University Teaching – Teaching Fellow Program
I was thrilled to be part of the inaugural cohort of UNSW Chemistry Teaching Fellows, and throughout my PhD I delivered 2-3 first year chemistry tutorials per week and received structured training, debriefing, and mentoring from Coordinator Dr Kim Lapere and other education-focussed staff. Additionally, I mentored the Teaching Fellows from later cohorts, created instructional handouts for atomic orbitals, undertook exam marking, outreach, and developed resources for 3rd year physical chemistry (detailed below).
Jupyter Notebooks for Physical Chemistry – Rising Star Award (PhD Causal Teachers)
The capacity for tech to improve how the physical sciences are taught is enormous, and I chose to develop 3rd year physical chemistry resources as part of my Teaching Fellowship. Physical and computational chemistry are increasingly reliant on programming, algorithms, and data analysis and I wanted to develop an accessible entry point to those skills for chemistry students who have varied (or no) background in computer science.
For this I turned to Python, using chemistry-specific examples to apply code in context familiar to students, and Jupyter notebooks to avoid any technical hassle in providing a consistent environment. I deployed a cloud-hosted JupyterHub to demonstrate this in a general audience pitch video, click the image below to watch.
I received the UNSW Rising Star Award (PhD Casual Teachers) for my resources and teaching. You can find an interview upon the award in the newsletter here, including discussion of my teaching philosophy.
My notebooks were incorporated into the redesigned CHEM3011 ‘Quantum Nature of Molecules’ course at UNSW in collaboration with Drs Junming Ho and Laura McKemmish. I demonstrated this redesigned CHEM3011 course in 2019 and 2020, and course satisfaction rose dramatically from 65% to 94%. The use of Jupyter notebooks and other digitial learning environments were crucially important for remote teaching of CHEM3011 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
High School Teaching
I worked as a causal science teacher at Matrix Education throughout my PhD. I taught mainly Chemistry (Y11 & Y12) and Junior Science (Y9 & Y10) and achieved consistently high ratings from students, with a 4.7/5 student experience questionnaire 2-year average rating across all classes. I have also tutored privately and through companies ever since leaving high school. I’ve been involved in several high school outreach events, including SciX@UNSW science extension and other high school visits.
