A holistic approach to teaching chemistry

There is a tendency in many national systems now for teachers to teach chemistry in modules. One of the results of this is that teachers themselves lose a holistic approach to chemistry and students never gain it in the first place. I personally think that it is really good practice to relate the topic you are currently teaching to all the other ten topics on the Core/AHL part of the programme. This will not only give students a much better understanding of chemistry as a whole but will also help them when they come to answer the data response question on Paper 2 and also some of the Section B questions on Paper 2 which again often involve relationships between topics. One of the activities I have devised for use in workshops is to put the participating teachers into pairs and ask them to choose a number between 1 and 11. The number they choose then identifies which topic they put in my ‘relationships between topics’ diagram. In the following example number 4 would have been chosen so Topic 4 (and 14) - Bonding goes into the middle (I have included the heading 'structure' with bonding in the diagram as shapes of molecules etc. plays a large part in this topic).

I then ask the teachers to think of two separate examples that they could include as they teach ‘Bonding and structure’ which relates it to each of the other ten topics.

You might like to try this for yourself. Do it several times and each time put a different topic in the middle. It is a good exercise for teachers new to the programme to get to know the syllabus and also a good exercise to give students near to the end of their course to help with their revision/review programme. Even if you are an experienced teacher I guarantee it will make you think and improve your teaching! It is perfectly possible to come up with at least two relationships between each of the eleven topics and the other ten.

In case you do have problems (or are just feeling lazy!) I have given one example for Standard level and one example for Higher Level relating three of the eleven topics1 to the remaining ten in the attached linked pages. There are of course many other possible answers. To illustrate to you the value of doing this I have taken one reaction which we normally only use when teaching organic chemistry and shown in detail how you could also relate it to some of the other topics with your students to produce some interesting results. 

In a separate section I have extended this to also give detailed examples of how to bring in the other areas of the programme, i.e. TOK, Internationalism and ‘Aim 8’. For these I have given many explicit examples for each of the eleven different chemistry topics.