Where do you get your educational passion from?
I mainly teach pre-service chemistry teachers; therefore, my passion grows when they realise that teaching is a craft they can shape deliberately. Together we transform content knowledge through thoughtful consideration of student conceptions, instructional strategies, assessments, and learning goals into a personal didactical toolbox, meaning workable approaches for real classrooms. At the Institute for Science Education, I find a mission that matches this passion: preparing teachers who reason with evidence and reflect on what students do and understand.
What teaching moment has always stayed with you?
At the end of many lessons, I show a picture of a bright red double decker bus and invite a perspective shift, the so-called didactical double decker. We name the two levels on which every lesson runs: the content deck and the pedagogy deck. First, we recall what content we learned during the lesson, then we analyse how the pedagogy was taught. Pre-service teachers choose which methods they want to try in their own classrooms and explain why these fit their students and goals. In the next session, we return to these choices. We discuss what they enacted, what worked, what needed adjustment and what evidence they noticed in students’ responses. This routine turns experience into professional knowledge and helps them develop a thoughtful, reflexive stance. The moment that stays with me is the smile that appears when the red bus comes up on the slide. By then, they are eager to look at both decks, and the image reminds us that content and pedagogy are designed together.
What do you hope your students take away from your education?
I hope they leave with confident curiosity and a commitment to student-centred approaches, where all ideas are welcomed, mistakes become productive steps in learning, and progress is built through collaboration. I also want them to build a routine of active practice with feedback, in which explaining a concept, performing a chemical experiment, trying a representation, checking for understanding and adjusting becomes a normal habit that raises the quality of what students experience.
What did you learn from your students?
My students keep me on my toes. I invite feedback, use it to adjust lessons, and make the reasoning visible by discussing what I am changing and why. That shared reflection clarifies why we build in active processing with questions, short tasks, and peer explanations, and it means I learn from my students all the time. They also tell me that in other courses a clear lecture can still leave them passive and underprepared for individual problem solving. This kind of feedback also shapes my research: in an ongoing project, I study how to make lectures more interactive, so learning aligns with constructivist principles. Teaching and research move together here, and our classroom becomes a place of mutual learning where we improve the tools we use.
What are you proud of as a lecturer?
I am proud when my course acts as an inspiration for a future teacher to find a method that suits their students. It is satisfying when a graduate writes that their class now talks differently about particles and reactions or that a new routine improved critical thinking in class. I am also proud of the sometimes quiet improvements, such as a better way to structure practical work so that students have time to think as well as to do.
I am grateful to contribute to the Institute for Science Education and its programmes that prepare teachers and support academic teaching development. In this community, I connect my interests in chemistry education research, classroom practice, and professional reflection in a way that serves both pre-service teachers’ development and the scientific literacy of their future students.