Thinking about actions to take: Photons Shift Energy

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

Try these

• integrating your current model of energy
• introducing a range of frequency dependent phenomena
• developing and exploiting a photon model of radiating
• linking radiating to the other three pathways (electrical, mechanical, heating by particles)

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

• rehearsing the wave–particle duality arguments of early last century
• making quantum physics too mystical
• using the photoelectric effect as the central phenomenon in introducing photons

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.