Thinking about actions to take: Radiating from Source to Absorber

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

Try these

• emphasising that there is movement as radiations travel from source to detector
• ensuring that radiating is presented as a unifying mechanism, across families of radiations
• using a simple, but evocative description of radiating, such as do like me, but later
• consistently characterising waves by their frequency and amplitude
• being consistent about the energy in stores and the power in pathways
• giving examples of the full range of media for each family of radiations
• explicitly modelling situations with ray diagrams

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

• referring to light energy
• not implying that light simply runs out
• conflating rays with physical objects
• not making unifying connections between different phenomena

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.