Thinking about actions to take: Describing Sound

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

Try these

• make explicit use of the source–medium–detector model
• model the vibrations as changes in density
• link the movements of the sources to changes in density
• keep the language simple: 'to and fro' may be more effective than 'longitudinal'
• relating what's pictured as a part of the model to human experiences
• draw simple sketches, rather than hanging too much on words

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 specious energy descriptions
• drawing or showing transverse waveforms
• asserting that sound is a wave without clarifying explanation of the idea of a wave
• conflating models with the lived-in world

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.