College physics, an active learning guide
Ever so often I manage to get hold of a book that makes me think more deeply about how I teach. This week, this book was delivered and I wish I had found it years ago. It is designed for American college students and is full of short exercises that are suitable for A level,…
Mix and match electricity questions
Life is currently crazy busy. I am marking and grading A levels and GCSE and have L6 and Yr 10 exams coming in. And I need to find a new place to live. Although I have no lessons currently, there is no time for reflection. However, before half term I was teaching about electricity and…
Newton’s Laws questions
This is one of the first sets of harder problems I give my GCSE class in Yr 10. None of the questions are hard as such (except maybe the whale and finding forces using the acceleration). However, I like these because students can’t go on automatic pilot, and there is a point to calculating weight,…
Ranking problems: assessment for learning
I read ‘The Physics Suite’ a few years ago, loved it and then failed to do anything with it. This year I started to look at ranking problems and have started to write a few of my own. (I also got hold of O’Kuma, Maloney and Hieggelke, 1999, Ranking task exercises in physics. And I…
What is involved in ‘learning’
Today I taught two A level lessons and they were both ‘shorts’ – so a bit less that half an hour. Both were revision based. In one, we were revising GCSE refraction and in the other, particle physics, in as far as it goes at A level. It is the end of the week, at…
Teaching about polarisation
Polarisation is one of my favourite topics in waves, even though it feels a like it is tagged on to the specification, and is frequently reduced to a multiple choice question about which types of waves can be polarised. However the demonstrations always impress students and there is so much to explain and think about.…
Simulations and physics
In these days of online learning, simulations are a really powerful tool. They stand in for practical work on occasion and can be used instead of static drawings. I use them in normal times too because they allow students to visualise process more easily and to try things out for themselves. These are my favourite…
A magnetic demonstration
Sometime a demonstration can show something quickly and easily, be tiny and simple, and yet still take the students by surprise. I steal my demonstrations from other teachers, websites, blogs, the IoP and very occasionally, I do something new in a lesson and find myself doing it forever. I have to admit, I am not…
Deliberate practice and trying something new
I have just started teaching about uniform electric fields and somehow this time it went wrong. I blame teaching online, because firstly, I don’t get the same level of feedback, and secondly, somehow learning online does not make the concepts ‘real’ to the student. There is something that happens when learning physics, where students are…
Teaching about electric fields
I find teaching fields hard. It is by far the most abstract part of the A level course, and if I am not careful it can degenerate into ‘here are the definitions and this is how you apply the equations’. This is especially true with online learning, where discussion is more difficult and it is…
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The reflective physics teacher 