Thinking about actions to take: Adding Elements to Circuits

There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:

Try these

• thinking about electrical loops
• linking what you do in setting up a loop to your reasoning about the circuit
• using model to mean a toolkit for thinking with that is capable of generating predictions
• reasoning about electrical loops as complete systems
• reasoning about parallel circuits as two complete loops
• being consistent in how you draw circuits

Teacher Tip: Work through the Physics Narrative to find these lines of thinking worked out and then look in the Teaching Approaches for some examples of activities.

Avoid these

• using sequential models, such as donation models
• conflating energy shifting and charge flowing
• electrical energy

Teacher Tip: These difficulties are distilled from: the research findings; the practice of well-connected teachers with expertise; issues intrinsic to representing the physics well.