Several years ago I began using a set of Ligand-of-the-Week exercises in my Inorganic course to encourage (force) students to go outside of our textbook and into the chemical reference materials and chemical literature to find examples of ligands that bind to metal ions. My motivation was to get my students to see the wonderful breadth of known metal-ligand complexes and to develop skills associated with analyzing and classifying ligands. My original paper is fairly complete and can be accessed via J. Chem. Educ. which is now available through the ACS website.

My technique for constructing MO diagrams is based on (and significantly simplified from) that of Verkade.  While I find it works well in my classroom for my students, they benefit from careful step-by-step instruction of the method through several weeks of in-class exercises.  This LO has links to pencasts where I go through three easy examples that demonstrate the technique, as well has how I handle lone pairs by this method.  As transition metal complexes don’t have stereochemically active lone pairs, they are often easier to deal with than even something seemingly as simple as water!

I use this in-class exercise after I have taught the students how to construct LGOs using the generator orbital technique.  The previous week, they do an in-class exercise on that topic, and this week, they use the LGOs from the previous week to construct MO diagrams.

For years, I spent 2-3 days a semester working through Tanabe-Sugano diagrams, their development from terms, their evolution from Orgel diagrams, their analysis to give transition energies (the old ruler- trial and error analysis) and nephalauxetic parameters.  Recently, colleagues in VIPEr convinced me that my time in class could be better spent, but I am not willing to completely give up on Tanabe-Sugano.

This is an in class activity to introduce the topic of multinuclear NMR, which is not covered (beyond ¹³C) in our sophomore level organic course. It is designed to walk the students through the process of predicting NMR spectra, as they learned in sophomore organic chemistry, but for a different I=1/2 nucleus, in this case ¹⁹F, which is I=1/2 and 100% abundant. 

This in-class activity was used on the first day of Advanced Inorganic Chemistry in lieu of lecture to review symmetry operations and point groups in small molecules.  The learning object was adapted to a small group discussion format from a fundamental quiz posted by Barbara Reisner (James Madison University) and a problem set question posted by Adam Johnson (Harvey Mudd College).