Newton's First Law
Forces and Motion

Thinking about actions to take: Predicting Constant Speed

Teaching Guidance for 11-14 Supporting Physics Teaching

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

Try these

  • making stronger and continuous links to work on forces
  • emphasising the counter-intuitive nature of Newtonian natural motion

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

  • drawing similar arrows for those representing forces and those representing movement
  • speaking of balanced forces—prefer the resultant force is equal to 0

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.

Newton's First Law
formalises Inertia
includes the quantity Force
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