Rethinking our Approach to Teacher Education

David Morrison-Love and Fiona Patrick, University of Glasgow. What began as a small scholarship project to help student teachers integrate theory with practice has led us to rethink our approach to teacher education. In this first of two blogposts, we ask some provocative questions that came out of our research. In the second, we explain our new approach to help student teachers use evidence and experience to inform […]

Authentic design tasks: How to teach the important and challenging dialogue with a client?

Gerald van Dijk, University of Applied Sciences, & Remke Klapwijk, TU Delft, The Netherlands Are you introducing your preservice teachers to ‘Design and Technology pedagogies’ in which  pupils work with real clients? During these authentic design processes, communication between the students and their client is crucial. For both parties it is not always easy to […]

Enhancing D&T teacher education

Introducing a new programme to run alongside your D&T teacher education course Matt McLain and Alison Hardy have a new 6 session programme beginning in October 2021 aimed at student D&T teachers . The programme works alongside the Learning to Teach Design and Technology textbook, with each session focusing on a different aspect of teaching D&T. The programme is […]

Developing online subject knowledge enhancement for prospective teachers of design and technology

Kate Finlay, Head of Design and Technology, Hethersett Academy. katefinlay@inspirationtrust.org It is quite a thing to build an online teaching course, it is another challenge entirely doing this during an unprecedented global pandemic. I was very young when I started teaching, but was fortunate to be doing a 4-year D&T BEd degree.  I have always […]

“No thank you, it’s not for me. I like my training to be face-to-face”: the challenges of moving to online CPD

Ryan Ball, Director of Education, Design and Technology Association, ryan.ball@data.org.uk “No thank you, it’s not for me. I like my training to be face-to-face” This was the generic response whenever we (The D&T Association) floated the idea of digital training with teachers over the last few years. Continual professional development is vital, and there is […]

ITE Recruitment in England: a retrospective

Matt McLain, Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education, Liverpool John Moores University m.n.mclain@ljmu.ac.uk When I moved into initial teacher education (ITE) at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) in 2009. ITE Recruitment for D&T was healthy, both at LJMU and nationally. We had 44 student teachers across our D&T and Engineering PGCE courses, plus an undergraduate programme […]

Learning to plan for progression: a collaborative medium term planning workshop with student teachers

Matt McLain, Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education (Design and Technology), Liverpool John Moores University. m.n.mclain@ljmu.ac.uk Learning how to plan lessons is an essential skill for beginning teachers. It is a skill that experience teachers often take for granted in themselves, which can make it difficult for student teachers when they see their mentors seeming to […]