Thinking about actions to take: Setting Up Electrical Loops

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

Try these

• Using and sharing an effective toolkit for thinking about circuits that allows you to make predictions
• Connecting thinking about your toolkit to choices made in assembling circuits on the benchtop
• interpreting equations as relationships between physical quantities
• giving a physical interpretation to equations
• using a range of representations to relate physical quantities (diagrams, words, mathematics, apparatus)

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

• encouraging the dash to the formula
• using triangles to rearrange equations
• relying on rote substitutions into formulae
• using an incoherent set of ad-hoc rules and metaphors, each of restricted validity

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.