Thinking about actions to take: Modelling Light with Ray Diagrams

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

Try these

• explicitly separating beams and rays
• being explicit about the modelling process
• exemplifying the construction of ray diagrams
• using the ray model to make predictions
• explicitly choosing rays to draw

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 rays and beams
• conflating the lived-in world with the theoretical world of physics
• sketching ray diagrams

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.