Teaching a Capability Task

Richard Kimbell must have read the Nuffield KS3 Teacher's Handbook! The research tool developed by the Assessing Design Innovation research and development project led by Richard Kimbell at the Technology Education Research Unit (TERU), Goldsmiths College, University of London, bears an uncanny resemblance to the approach to teaching a Nuffield Capability Task.

Richard Kimbell unveiled an intriguing approach to enabling young people to act creatively in responding to a design brief at QCA on 7th February. By carefully structuring the response, the activity booklet enables pupils to have ideas, grow them and prove them by a succession of modelling activities in which they receive feedback from their peers. The stimulus for the activity is a handling collection and the pupils are provided with a range of modelling materials with which to develop their ideas as well as space on the page to sketch.

One of Richard's key points was that this activity structure empowered the pupils to develop THEIR ideas.

If you look at the Nuffield KS3 Teacher Handbook, published in 2000, Pages 17 � 20 you will find guidance that mirrors the TERU approach. (Click download at the foot of this page.) These include the following.

How should the teacher introduce the task?
The Nuffield approach lists 8 possible starters including handling collections.

How does the teacher ensure good design ideas?
Here the Nuffield approach advocates the sharing of design ideas produced by the class so that pupils can choose which of the many produced they can develop further. This is different from the TERU approach that requires pupils to develop ideas individually but later in the TERU activity sequence there is a whole class post it sharing session.

How will students model solutions?
Here the Nuffield asks the teacher to consider the range of possible modelling that would be suitable – 2D, 3D, virtual.

How can the teacher ensure that pupils stay on track?
It is here that the Nuffield approach suggests peer review, not two pupils commenting on another's work as suggested by TERU but through pupils working pairs taking it in turns to be client and designer with each other's design proposals, present in a variety of modelled forms.

The teacher in the TERU activity sequence was deliberately marginalised – after all it was an assessment exercise – but teacherly intervention was modelled through an octagonal dice which provided questions to make the pupils stop and think. This didn't work (surprise, surprise). In the Nuffield approach the teacher is asked to consider the sort of written feedback to give individual pupils when that are at the advanced modelling stage before committing to making. To some extent this parallels the intention of the dice. The advice given was to give comments about the design, either overall or on a point of detail, about the production, such as where particular care is necessary, and a comment to motivate, personal to the student. Difficult to imagine a dice doing this!

The TERU team had come up with the brilliant idea of recording the development of the 3D models by using a sequence digital photographs that could be printed quickly and fixed onto the activity sheet and provide a record of the development of the developing idea. The Nuffield team didn't come up with that but in the revised edition of the Teacher's Handbook that will be appearing on the web soon this will definitely be included in the Nuffield approach to teaching a Capability Task.

The complete list of teacher decisions that support pupils in designing and making products based on their own ideas is summarised in the attached (62 KB) PDF. Note that it includes consideration of how to manipulate the decisions to achieve progression across a key stage.