Thinking about actions to take: Sources of Ionising Radiation

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

Try these

• dealing with the properties of ionising radiations before dealing with the sources
• building up a simplified model of the atom, as needed
• introducing a wide variety of sources, not only nuclear
• building and discussing models of exponential decay
• relating emissions to transmutations
• exploiting a good model of energy, discussing changes in the nuclear store

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

• not drawing attention to the vastly different energies of photons with nuclear and atomic origins
• not emphasising the nuclear origins of the ionising emissions
• using the term atomic power
• keeping the different representations of exponential decay separate, rather than relating them
• avoiding negative energy, when accounting for nuclear transformations

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.