Creative GCSE Chemistry lessons with engaging problem solving

My goal for students is to create and learning environment that is conducive to questions. Often teachers request questions at the end, however in my own learning I found that leaving questions often resulted in forgetting the question, or losing my train of thought in connecting the topic at hand to the existing schema that I am trying to fit the information into. That is why when I teach, I encourage interruptions and questions as they arise as I find that way students are better able to follow my logic of presenting and I can better understand by which train of thought the class is learning the material. My curiosity driven approach to teaching has been shown to be effective in all ages. First introduced by Jerome Bruner as the discovery approach to teaching which followed the work of Jean Piaget (Takaya, 2008). Bruner’s approach follows the mantra “learning by doing” where learning is best when students discover the information for themselves, making the information more viable for problem solving (Takaya, 2008). This is exemplified in the questioning approach as by generating a question the student is forced to reflect on their own knowledge, pose a question about something they do not know, then discover the answer. Applying this to research on science education discovery learning has been shown to increase student engagement, and allows students to reflect on their learning (Gravelle & Fisher, 2012).