Explicit Modelling in D&T - Moving Beyond Demonstration

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In this episode, I explore the boundary between pedagogy and curriculum intent in D&T education. I reflect on how we can make our implicit modelling of design strategies more explicit to enhance pupils' learning and metacognitive awareness.

Drawing from my classroom experience, I consider those moments when I implemented activities like Design Fiction or 635, but didn't articulate why I'd selected these approaches or when pupils might choose to use them. I question whether I was sufficiently explicit when making material choices—why select 4mm acrylic rather than 6mm?—and how sharing this reasoning might have deepened pupils' design thinking.

Unlike simple demonstration of techniques, explicit modelling reveals the decision-making processes underpinning good design practice. While this connects to aspects of Rosenshine's principles of instruction, D&T presents unique opportunities as our projects unfold over weeks rather than single lessons.

This approach has relevance beyond the National Curriculum, with international educators similarly exploring how to make design thinking visible to learners. Whether you're teaching in a secondary school in Birmingham or a technology college in Melbourne, making your design decisions explicit helps pupils develop their own design capabilities.

As you plan your next scheme of work, which design decisions might you make visible to your pupils? How might explicitly modelling your thinking transform their understanding of the design process? I'd love to hear how explicit modelling works in your context.

Acknowledgement:
Some of the supplementary content for this podcast episode was crafted with the assistance of Claude, an AI language model developed by Anthropic. While the core content is based on the actual conversation and my editorial direction, Claude helped in refining and structuring information to best serve listeners. This collaborative approach allows me to provide you with concise, informative, and engaging content to complement each episode.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Exploring metacognitive awareness in teaching
• 0:54 Teachers modelling design strategies implicitly
• 1:50 The importance of explicit modelling
• 3:21 Connecting to Rosenshine's principles
• 5:22 Beyond demonstration: thinking aloud

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 0:07

I wanted to take a moment to think a little bit deeper about some of the things I discussed in the episodes where I talked about blurring the boundaries between pedagogy and curriculum intent, and I wanted to think about some different ways that teachers might be more explicit in their modelling and their teaching when they're actually using a strategy that they're teaching to the children, this sort of meta cognitive awareness that I talked about and I wanted to think about well, how might that be done? So this wasn't part of the research that I've done, but it did get me thinking about what we might call it. So I called it metacognition or meta-awareness, but actually it made me think about the fact that what is the teacher doing? What does the teacher need to do? So what, as teachers, people might not be thinking about is that when they do something like design, fiction or 635, that they are implicitly modeling the design strategy, they're using it as a pedagogy. They're thinking about um, this is a tool that the children can use to, in the 635 case, generate more activities, whereas the bit that I think is maybe missing is that the teachers are aware that what they're doing is modelling and so they need to model some of the decisions behind why a pupil, a student, might decide to use that strategy 635 and in what conditions, that they'll need a group of them to be doing that together. And so that's the thinking aloud that a teacher maybe needs to be doing. So be explicit about the, the activity and the decisions that they've made and that can come in other places as well. So you know, we, we.

Alison Hardy: 2:09

I remember when I was teaching I used to make decisions about the materials that I would use and that I'd allow the children to use. But I might not be always explicit with the children about the design decisions that I'd made and where I'd made them. I might know that part of my reason was that that's the material I had in the cupboard, that I wanted them to be learning about thermoplastics, so we were using acrylic, for example, but I didn't talk about, for example, why, when we stocked up, we bought four mil or six mil acrylic and what that might mean and what implication that might have on their designing. So I needed to be, I think, more explicit in my modelling of my design decisions so they could be more aware of them. It's a nice sunny day here, so Kip's just gone outside. You might have just heard him giving a good bark outside and there he goes again. So that would be my, my way of thinking about this.

Alison Hardy: 3:14

It's not a demonstration but it's a modelling and so they're modelling and we can see a lot that's talked about modelling. There's a lot of research out there about modelling, maths concepts, modelling maths solutions and Rosenshine. I'm not a great proponent of Rosenshine but it's used quite a lot. His work is used quite a lot by Tom Sherrington and Doug Lamarve, who I've got my doubts about some of their work. But if you want to kind of think about that that principles of instruction that comes from Rosenshine. They talk about modelling.

Alison Hardy: 3:48

But I think in design and technology, particularly when as a teacher you've planned a design and make activity, that modeling goes on over several weeks and it might be at the beginning, you need to be explicit about the decisions that you've made, about the steps you're going to go through when designing and making and where their decisions are going to be available for them and why you've given those decisions and why you've taken away other decisions. So maybe there's an opportunity at the start of a design and make for a teacher to be more explicit and you would decide how much you want to, to share or the children know, because you want to do, you don't want to overload them with information but I think this, this instructional modeling as a way of thinking as a designer, is really important because you've made design decisions as a teacher when thinking about a design and make. So I think this idea about explicit modeling is really key and it does fit, as I said, with Rosen and Shine's work about the principles of instruction. This idea about modelling so, and I think you can talk it through and you can talk it through about at different stages in a unit of work and you might ask them to use some of those questions or to reflect on those decisions that you've made and what they learn from those decisions that you've made. So I think there's quite a lot there to unpick.

Alison Hardy: 5:21

That starts to um, de-blur clear the mist is that the words um, this separate this, uh, distinction between pedagogy and curriculum content. So I think think it's beyond demonstrating. You know, this is how you use a sewing machine to stitch a straight line. It's actually doing some of that thinking out loud. So the key terms to me are thinking out loud, modelling, explicit and I'm going to add on explicit instruction, but I'm a little bit twitchy about that because we're about developing children's design and technology capability. So there we go. I've just shared some of my thoughts about this, as I'm thinking about it along the way and what this might look like in practice.