Energy Transferred by Working
Energy and Thermal Physics

Thinking about actions to take: Shifting Energy Between Stores

Teaching Guidance for 11-14 Supporting Physics Teaching

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.

Energy Transferred by Working
appears in the relation dU=dQ+dW
is used in analyses relating to Working Engines Thermionic Emission
is a special case of Work
has the special case Potential Energy Kinetic Energy
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