Discipline: Chemistry
About Me: My career has taken various twists and turns over the years. I came to Keele from a Post-doc in Lausanne, Switzerland where I was interested in a very pure area of Chemistry centred around stereocontrol. At Keele my research turned towards Chemical Ecology in particular the pheromones of social insects and alongside this I developed a strong interest in Science Communication eventually leading to a NESTA Dreamtime award. I was interviewed for the award two days after my first daughter was born and I completed it 20 months later when my wife went back to work full time after our second daughter was 6 months old, it was a busy time. Since then I have worked part-time starting at 20% and slowly moving up to 70% which is where I am now. The research I do now is mainly into the application of TBL to Chemistry teaching and other teaching and learning interventions applied to Chemistry.
Twitter: @KeeleTBL
Personal profile: https://www.keele.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/grjones/
Interest in TBL: My TBL journey started by accidentally attending a TBL101 at the ViCEPHEC meeting in Durham August 2014. I only went to the session because I walked out of another session which was full of Keele colleagues, so I hadn’t done any of the preparation. My colleague Laura Hancock was also there which has proved to be invaluable. Enough to say I loved the iFAT scratch cards and managed to blag the remaining stock that Mark Paetkau had brought with him from Canada. That next semester I gave TBL a go for the first time and it was such as success I made scratch cards of my own using laminated sheets and tippex. Since then I haven’t looked back. There are over a dozen academics using TBL at Keele now in a range of disciplines and together we make up the Keele Centre for Team Based Learning. We have managed to spread the TBL word out to other UK institutions including York, Sheffield, Bath and even Belgrade and Iceland. As I have attended the TBL train the trainer course it is fair to say that I now understand we are not TBL purists but we are TBL pragmatists and are keen to share the positive results we have seen using TBL.
Publications/Presentations in TBL:
- Brown N, Howe C, Jones GR, Phillips TR. 2018. Active Learning Techniques to Build Problem Solving Skills in Chemistry Students. Journal of Academic Development and Education.
- Hancock, L. M., Howe C., Plana, D., Jones, G.R. and Phillips, T. R. (2017) Scratching the Surface of Team-Based Learning. Education in Chemistry, 5, 22-25
- Jones GR and Hancock LM. 2015. Team Based Learning: A Scratch Approach to Large Group Problem Classes. Journal of Academic Development in Higher Education, 98-103.