Thinking about actions to take: Forces - a New Way of Seeing

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

Try these

• Building explicit connections between the actions of animate and inanimate environments on an object
• Being consistent in the drawing of force arrows
• Giving children a variety of representations to hand when asking for descriptions
• Arranging it so that the placing of arrows is provisional and open to debate
• Focusing on the physical reasons for expecting a force to be acting – e.g. the bombardment by particles
• Acting as if Newton's first law really is hard to believe
• Speaking, acting and drawing with exemplary precision, so children can apprentice their practice on yours
• Using a rich variety of examples

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

• Relying too much on precise words by themselves
• Acting as if the placing of arrows is obvious and open to a simple inspection
• Referring to forces cancelling out
• Using complex objects on which forces might be acting (with internally moving parts – bicycles, cars, people.)

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.