Thinking about actions to take: Designed Devices Switch Pathways

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

Try these

• developing physical descriptions before accounts that use energy and power
• using apparatus, words and diagrams together to develop accounts
• emphasising the practical consequences of calculations with power and energy
• putting new theoretical ideas to work to imbue them with meaning

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

• replacing the physical arguments with mnemonics
• arguing about power and energy without quantifying
• conflating different steps of multistep arguments
• not making links between different devices, all of which switch power

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.