Part One: Learning to plan

Liam Anderson, Head of Design & Technology at Trinity School, Newbury

I was privileged to recently lead a session at the University of Reading for D&T student teachers on curriculum planning. In this blog post, I will share some of my reflections on how to effectively support student teachers to develop their thinking and understanding of the complexities and beauty of D&T curriculum design.

Student teachers are usually quickly immersed into short term planning, through writing individual lesson plans, as soon as they start their initial teacher training. However, this narrow, lesson-by-lesson focus does not help them to develop their understanding of the ‘big picture’ of how the curriculum has been designed with medium and long term planning in mind. This is understandable, with student teachers first needing to get to grips with the necessities of lesson planning and the ‘nuts and bolts’ of designing effective individual lessons. However, in order for student teachers to truly plan an effective lesson, or sequence of lessons, it is essential that they are exposed to, and involved in, medium (larger sequences of learning involving units of work) and long-term planning (an academic year, key stage, or whole school journey, including transitions between year groups/key stages) of a D&T curriculum. 

During my time working as a mentor with the D&T student teachers training at Reading, we have focused on teaching for GCSE. The questions I want the student teachers to reflect on as they begin to develop their understanding of D&T curriculum design and planning are:

• What are we trying to achieve with pupils in D&T at GCSE?
• What do you expect pupils to know and be able to do in D&T?
• Why do you want pupils to know and be able to do this?

I ask the D&T student teachers to reflect on these questions, forgetting about the constraints and requirements of assessment and specifications, focusing more on what knowledge, skills and attributes we are aiming to develop in our pupils through a high quality D&T experience at GCSE level. This should ultimately be the very first starting point of curriculum design and planning – what is the purpose of what we are teaching and what are we aiming to achieve in our curriculum (i.e. our intentions). This is why it is so essential that student teachers are given opportunities to understand this bigger picture of the purpose behind the curriculum for D&T early on in their teaching career.

Having reflected on and discussed the purpose of why we teach D&T with the student teachers, we also considered how too often a GCSE curriculum is designed around the assessment requirements, or worse, written in the same order or sequence as is presenting in the specification list of contents. Exam specifications are not designed as a curriculum and effective implementation requires careful planning and understanding of knowledge and progression in D&T, as well as having a clear focus on the purpose of D&T at GCSE level. I believe the purpose of GCSE D&T is to teach pupils the design tools they need to tackle real world problems and challenges to become informed and confident designers, consumers and citizens in the modern world which is surrounded by design and technology. GCSE D&T should encourage pupils to learn design through doing design, equipping them with a design awareness, ability to use design thinking and have an understanding and appreciation of design practice. This is important for D&T student teachers to recognise in their understanding of the medium and long-term planning of the curriculum so that they do not lose sight of why they are teaching the subject.

Hardy (2021) discusses that the purpose of the D&T curriculum is to develop students’ D&T capability and highlights five features of what this might look like if pupils are developing their D&T capability in an effective curriculum over time. I shared with the student teachers what these aspects of D&T capability are and how we have developed these within my own school’s curriculum design as our key purpose for teaching the D&T curriculum at GCSE:

1. Pupils use developing design knowledge and skills in a creative and purposeful way.
2. Pupils take responsibility for the form and direction of their own design process and work.
3. Pupils can modify their design work in light of personal reflection.
4. Pupils make informed judgements about design decisions.
5. Pupils can handle uncertainty and tackle, with increasing independence, ‘wicked’ and complex design problems.

I then worked with the D&T student teachers looking at how knowledge is structured and sequenced in the D&T curriculum, as a starting point to consider how we plan for building knowledge and progression over time that will allow opportunities for developing pupils’ D&T capability. There has been much debate for a long time about the forms and types of knowledge in D&T (and continues to be!), but student teachers can still consider more general forms of knowledge that do need consideration within content and structure of design and technology knowledge at GCSE level. As I had highlighted previously to the D&T student teachers, the exam specifications at GCSE are not written in a way that takes account of logical progression and sequencing of content, it is rather a list of content that requires teaching. Therefore, it is key that D&T student teachers take account of this and have a solid understanding of how and when knowledge should be taught in order for an effective D&T curriculum to be developed over time that builds pupils’ schema as new knowledge is taught and introduced.  

In summary, it is key for student teachers to be exposed to the ‘big picture’ of the curriculum they are teaching and have an understanding of the intention of why they are teaching the subject. Working with student teachers on discussions about these things is paramount in order for them to ensure their thinking about lesson planning and design fits with the intentions and longer term sequencing of developing pupils’ D&T capability over time.

Reflection task:

Talk with your D&T student teacher you are mentoring and ask them to reflect on the following:

• What is the purpose of the D&T curriculum: what do we want pupils to know/be able to do?
• How does the D&T curriculum develop pupils’ capability over time?

Reference

Myatt & Co/Dr Alison Hardy (2021). D&T capability. Available at: https://films.myattandco.com/programs/dandt-capability [Accessed 21 January 2023)