Design and Technology
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 Manor Drive Primary pupils 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.
Manor Drive Primary pupils will learn about cooking, food and nutrition, 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.
Implementation
At Manor Drive Primary Academy our curriculum is carefully designed to introduce and reinforce knowledge, following instructional principles informed by an understanding of memory function and cognitive load theory.
The CUSP Design and Technology curriculum is structured into blocks, each focusing on specific disciplines such as food and nutrition, mechanisms, structures, systems, electrical systems, materials, and textiles. Vertical progression is intentionally embedded, ensuring that pupils revisit these key areas throughout their primary education, encountering increasing levels of challenge and complexity.
Alongside the core knowledge necessary for success in each discipline, the curriculum highlights essential skills in the Working as a Designer section. Each module emphasises different aspects of these competencies, helping teachers assess pupils’ overall development as designers, as well as their mastery of the taught knowledge and skills.
Key aspects to learning:
Substantive knowledge - This ambitious Design and Technology curriculum emphasises excellence in the subject by spotlighting remarkable designers and innovators, shaping both subject knowledge and vocabulary.
Substantive concepts - are the big ideas, and the golden threads, that run through a coherent and cohesive art curriculum. In addition to the core knowledge required to be successful within each discipline, the curriculum outlines key aspects of design technology development in the Working as a Designer section. Each module will focus on developing different aspects of these competencies.
*Disciplinary knowledge – this is the use of knowledge and how children become a little more expert at working as a designer through CUSP enquiry-based learning.
*Knowledge notes are an elaboration in the core knowledge found in knowledge organisers. Knowledge notes focus pupils’ working memory to the key question that will be asked at the end of the lesson. It reduces cognitive load and avoids the split-attention effect.
*Retrieval practice is planned into the curriculum through spaced learning and interleaving and as part of considered task design by the class teacher to ensure knowledge is transferred into the long-term memory.
*Explicit Vocabulary is purposefully sequenced into the CUSP curriculum to ensure Tier 2 and 3 vocabularies are explicitly taught along with the etymology and morphology, relevant idioms and colloquialisms to ensure learning sticks. We aim to provide a high challenge with a low-threat culture and put no ceiling on any child’s learning, instead providing the right scaffolding for each child to achieve.
*Misconceptions are explicitly revealed as non-examples and positioned against known and accurate content as pupils become more expert in their understanding.
*Cumulative quiz questions - Feedback, low-threat quizzes, thinking hard tasks and structured assessment tasks all contribute towards the bigger picture of how well pupils retain and remember the content.
*Oracy tasks provide ample opportunities for teachers to evaluate pupils’ ability to: use the language of design and technology effectively;
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explain techniques, skills and processes;
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evaluate their own and others’ work.
Impact
The impact of this curriculum design will lead to outstanding progress over time across key stages relative to a child’s individual starting point and their progression of skills.
HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT CHILDREN HAVE LEARNT?
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Questioning
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Pupil Study (talking about learning with the children)
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Talking to teachers
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Low-stakes ‘Drop-in’ observations
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Quizzing and retrieval practice
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Live feedback
As a result, children are expected to leave Manor Drive Primary Academy having achieved at least age-related expectations in Design Technology. Our CUSP Design Technology curriculum will also inspire pupils to become enthusiastic designers and innovators.