Going Beyond The Syllabus

A good way to engage students with the material they encounter on the syllabus is to expose them to inspiring material, which puts what they are learning in context and shows them `the bigger picture`.

A nice example of this is the BBC documentary `Gravity and Me: The Force that Shapes Our Lives`. The documentary traces the story of gravity, from Galileo`s investigations into falling objects to state-of-the-art experiments, which have picked up the ripples through space-time of colliding black holes!

Another great example is `The Feynman Lectures on Physics` which are freely available online. While most of these lectures are beyond A-level standard (they are lectures that were delivered to undergraduates), some of them are qualitative in nature and can be understood by school students. For instance, the first few chapters of volume I can be read by GCSE students, while chapter 16 of volume II (`Induced Currents`) can be profitably read by year 13 students who are learning electromagnetic induction.