Thinking about actions to take: Colours of Two Kinds

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

Try these

• separating perceptual and spectral colours
• introducing and exploiting a simple account of colour vision
• introducing filtering colours as a process of removing certain frequencies
• preferring frequency to wavelength
• explaining in detail, on several occasions, why something appears the colour that it does
• bringing to mind the psychological aspects of colour perception, perhaps by showing a few well chosen illusions

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

• conflating adding and removing frequencies
• subtracting colours
• trying to explain the rainbow, for most classes
• reducing the complex processes of colour perception to simple physical principles

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.