Thinking Out Loud: How Teachers Can Model Design Decisions

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In this episode of Talking D&T, I explore the crucial distinction between using design strategies as pedagogy and explicitly teaching these strategies as curriculum content. Drawing from my recent research on blurred boundaries between pedagogy and curriculum intent, I consider how teachers can make their modelling more explicit to develop students' metacognitive awareness.

I examine how D&T teachers often implicitly model design strategies – like design fiction or the 635 method – without explicitly discussing the decision-making process behind choosing these approaches. Two particularly interesting insights emerge: firstly, the importance of 'thinking aloud' about our design decisions as teachers, and secondly, how we can make visible the reasoning behind material choices and project constraints.

Beyond simple demonstration of techniques, this approach involves sharing our thinking as designers and curriculum planners. I suggest practical ways teachers might implement this metacognitive modelling at different stages of a project, helping pupils understand not just how to use design strategies, but when and why they might select them.

For D&T practitioners, this perspective offers an opportunity to reflect on your own practice. How explicit are you about the design decisions you've made when planning projects? Do your pupils understand why certain materials or constraints have been selected? Consider how you might share more of your design thinking with learners to develop their capacity for independent decision-making.

What small change could you make in your next lesson to make your design decisions more visible to your pupils?

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 Blurring Pedagogy and Curriculum
• 2:59 Modeling Design Decisions
• 5:39 Instructional Modeling vs Demonstration
• 7:51 Thinking Out Loud in Teaching

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 1:22

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 metacognitive 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 allowed 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: 3:24

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 4mm or 6mm 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. 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.

Alison Hardy: 4:55

But if you want to kind of think about that that principles of instruction that comes from Rose and Shine. They talk about modelling. 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 instructional modelling, 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 you make. So I think this idea about explicit modelling is really key and it does fit, as I said, with Rosenshine's work about the principles of instruction.

Alison Hardy: 6:14

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. That starts to de-blur clear. The mist is that the words Separate this distinction between pedagogy and curriculum content and curriculum content. So I 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.