Thinking about actions to take: Levers

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

Try these

• relating the action of the lever to conservation of energy
• using separate terms, and separate shorthand, for distances moved and lengths to the pivot
• drawing forces consistently, and as you did during the forces topic

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 a single example, which is liable to misinterpretation
• reducing the topic to a series of algorithmic calculations
• moving too quickly from the physical to the abstract and mathematical

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.