Thinking about actions to take: Seeing With Light

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

Try these

• exemplifying seeing in the lived-in world using the source–medium–detector model
• emphasising the trip time as a delay between source and detector
• working up some convincing demonstrations that light seems to travel in straight lines
• always explicitly accounting for reductions in brightness

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

• speaking or acting as if light was just there
• assuming that how we see is well understood
• assuming that seeing is all accounted for by the physics
• conflating rays (the theoretical construct) with light beams (the physical)

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.