What Constitutes a Successful Experience in Teaching Chemistry? Characteristic Examples from the Greek Educational Context

In the first part of this work, a brief literature review is made on the issue of what is meant by “successful teaching experience”. Research has provided evidence for specific components that influence “success” namely beliefs for self-efficacy, feedback, possibility for student self-regulation and active participation, possibility for inquiry, collaboration, differentiation in ways of students’ learning. Subsequently, in the second part of this work a set of five examples of successful chemistry teaching experiences is briefly presented and critically analyzed. In all cases, the “success” of the presented teaching strategies is justified via educational research. Among the selected successful chemistry teaching experiences, one refers to primary school (use of particulate nature of matter for teaching phase changes), one refers to lower secondary school (use of different types of 3D visualizations for teaching mixtures’ separation methods), two refer to upper secondary school (parallel use of laboratory experiment and ICT for teaching physicochemical properties of fatty acids, minimizing working memory load for teaching atomic and bonding theory) and one refers to teaching at university (blended learning -hybrid instructional model for teaching molecular symmetry and group theory). The Greek examples provide evidence for the need of concurrent use of a carefully selected variety of teaching strategies, techniques and materials in order to readily enhance the effectiveness of chemistry (and science) teaching.