Subject Overview
WORKING AS A DESIGNER
INTENT
We want our children to love Design Technology. We want them to feel ambitious and feel able to access roles as architects, graphic designers, chefs or carpenters.
Design and Technology is dynamic and multidimensional. It is our intention that our DT curriculum will provide opportunities to solve real and relevant problems, allowing our pupils to develop essential everyday skills and unlock their potential to be the designers and innovators of tomorrow. The DT curriculum will encourage children to learn, to think and intervene creatively to solve problems both as an individual and as part of a team.
Design and Technology will allow all children to put their learning from other areas of the curriculum into practice, and will work to enhance and deepen their understanding of those areas, including Maths, Computing, Science, and Art.
Children will learn about cooking, food and nutrition, this will take place at Eldon House, ensuring that they acquire the fundamental life skills in order to be able to feed themselves healthily and independently, whilst learning about where food comes from, therefore making connections with their geographical and scientific knowledge.
Eldon Primary work alongside the CUSP partnership and use their resources to teach Design and Technology.
Our curriculum is structured to introduce and revisit knowledge, following the principles of instruction, guided by understanding how the memory works and cognitive load theory.
The Design and Technology curriculum is organised into blocks with each block covering a particular set of disciplines, including food and nutrition, mechanisms, structures, systems, electrical systems, understanding materials and textiles. Vertical progression in each discipline has been deliberately woven into the fabric of the curriculum so that pupils revisit key disciplines throughout their Primary journey at increasing degrees of challenge and complexity.
In addition to the core knowledge required to be successful within each discipline, the curriculum outlines key aspects of development in the Working as a Designer section. Each module will focus on promoting different aspects of these competencies. This will support teachers in understanding pupils’ progress as designers more broadly, as well as how successfully they are acquiring the taught knowledge and skills.
School is also a member of the DT association.
WHAT DO WE TEACH?
EARLY YEARS
Children use what they have learnt about media and materials in original ways, thinking about uses and purposes. They represent their own ideas, thoughts and feelings through design and technology, art, music, dance, role-play and stories. Early Years have access to intelligent provision such as real tools and a woodwork station to support Design Technology.
KEY STAGE 1 & 2
HOW DO CHILDREN LEARN?
Class timetables have been built to ensure a broad and balanced curriculum.
Subjects have been blocked in a spaced retrieval model to support catch up and to build the frequency of science and wider curriculum subjects. This maximises learning time
DT has been timetabled in an extended session to enable children to have time to develop depth and to save time setting up/packing away resources.
KNOWLEDGE ORGANISER
Knowledge Organisers contain core information for children to easily access and use as a point of reference and as a means of retrieval practice.
RETRIEVAL PRACTICE
Retrieval practice is planned into the curriculum through spaced learning and interleaving and as part of considered task design by the class teacher. Teaching and learning resources and provided for class Teachers so they can focus their time on subject knowledge and task design.
VOCABULARY
The units are supported by vocabulary modules which provide both resources for teaching and learning vital vocabulary and provide teachers with Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary with the etymology and morphology needed for explicit instruction details relevant idioms and colloquialisms to make this learning explicit.
We aim to provide a high challenge with low threat culture and put no ceiling on any child’s learning, instead providing the right scaffolding for each child for them to achieve.
IMPACT
Our Design and Technology curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. Our assessment systems enable teachers to make informed judgements about the depth of pupil learning and the progress pupils make over time. If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress. In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
HOW DO WE KNOW THAT THE LEARNING HAS STUCK?
The assessment of pupils is formative and is based on pupil outcomes and questioning from each lesson. The following can be used to assess pupils’ knowledge and application of skills and techniques as well as their understanding and use of relevant vocabulary.
Expectations for each block are made explicit and outcomes are specified for each lesson.
The Questions for assessment section in each block provides specific questions to be used with pupils to elicit their level of understanding of tools, techniques and effects, e.g. How have the properties of the cotton changed? Is the cotton now more or less functional?
Oracy and Vocabulary tasks provide ample opportunities for teachers to evaluate pupils’ ability to: use the language of design and technology effectively;
explain techniques, skills and processes;
evaluate their own and others’ work.
A vocabulary quiz provides an opportunity for teachers to assess pupils’ deeper understanding and application of the technical vocabulary covered in the block.
Exemplification is available and can be used to inform assessment of pupil outcomes and to support teachers in developing their own subject knowledge. They demonstrate the expected standard against which teachers can assess pupils’ work.
The best form of assessment in Design and Technology is at the point of delivery, while pupils are working. This helps us to understand pupils’ development as designers, rather than their ability to produce a prescribed end outcome. By encouraging pupils to articulate their thinking and reflections, we can understand which aspects of Design and Technology may require additional teaching and reshape teaching to support this.
QUESTIONS FOR ASSESSMENT
A series of self evaluation questions are provided for each unit.
