At Callington Primary School, our children are DESIGNERS.
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 Callington 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.
Callington 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
Callington Primary School have adopted the CUSP Design and Technology curriculum. 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 CUSP 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.
WHAT DO WE TEACH?
EARLY YEARS
Children use what they have learnt about media and materials in original ways, thinking about uses and purposes. Children have access to a wide range of tools and materials throughout their daily continuous provision and are encouraged to utilise these throughout their play. Children represent their own ideas, thoughts and feelings through design and technology, art, music, dance, role-play and stories.
How do pupils 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.
OVERVIEW OF KNOWLEDGE
The overview provides a list of the expected outcomes for the block and provides details of the design knowledge and skills pupils will be expected to have acquired by the end of the block. It includes detailed explanations of the core knowledge covered in each block.
RETRIEVAL PRACTISE
Retrieval practise 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.
KNOWLEDGE NOTES
Knowledge notes focus pupils’ working memory to the key question that will be asked at the end of the lesson. It reduces cognitive load.
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
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.
Children will therefore be expected to leave Callington reaching at least age related expectations for Design and Technology. Our Design and Technology curriculum will also lead pupils to be enthusiastic learners, evidenced in a range of ways, including pupil voice and their work.
HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT THE CHILDREN HAVE LEARNT?
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.
A PUPIL BOOK STUDY TELLS US:
- What impact is our CURRICULUM having?
What effect is the curriculum architecture having?
2. Does teaching support LONG-TERM LEARNING?
Is the evidence-led practice really being deployed at a classroom level, or is it superficial?
3.Do tasks enable pupils to THINK HARD and CREATE LONG-TERM MEMORY?
How impactful are tasks, and do they help pupils to think hard and generate learning?