Thinking about actions to take: Energy Resources and Pathways

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

Try these

• linking the discussion about the depletion of resources to the ideas of stores
• linking the distinction between renewable and non-renewable to human concerns and timescales
• clearly distinguishing between stores (joules) and pathways (watts)

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 rates of power in pathways with stores of energy
• connecting together more than two stores into a chain, eg kinetic  →  thermal  →  gravitational
• talking about energy being lost, running out or wasted
• developing complicated descriptions of cases of dynamic equilibrium

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.