Thinking about actions to take: The Solar System and Beyond

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

Try these

• explicitly modelling the scales of objects
• drawing attentions to the different scales used in representations
• engaging the imagination so that the very real difficulties in matching the phenomena to the models are evident

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

• using diagrams where multiple scales are represented uncritically
• providing too much detailed history
• treating the different models as facts
• not separating what is observed from the explanations for those observations

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.