Thinking about actions to take: Shifting Energy Between Stores
Teaching Guidance for 11-14
There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:
Try these
- working as if energy is, in essence, quantitative
- using energy as a constraint on possibilities, not a cause of a process
- using a clear teaching model
- always taking simply about energy and changes in the energy
- developing the idea of a store as a placeholder for a calculated energy change
- working from well-described snapshot to well-described snapshot, then discussing the energy changes
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
- allowing an endless list of kinds of energy
- using energy as cause
- using qualifying adjectives in front of
energy
- treating energy as a physical substance
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.