From Typology to Teacher Development: Using the Eleven Types in ITE and Mentoring (Part 3 of 3)

The final part of a three-part series for D&T teacher educators, mentors and CPD leads. Part 1 set out why ‘ideation’ has been doing too much work. Part 2 worked through the eleven types as a reference. This part is the one to read with a scheme of work, a trainee's lesson plan or next term's CPD calendar open beside you.

Matt McLain, Liverpool John Moores University, m.n.mclain@ljmu.ac.uk

Progression isn't a ladder, it's a repertoire

This is the heart of the argument and the part most worth carrying into your ITE programme, your mentoring practice or your CPD design. Progression in ideation is not movement up from adaption to transformation, not for pupils, and not for the teachers you are developing. It is the expansion of a repertoire along three measures:

• Breadth: the range of epistemic, social and mediational resources orientations a learner can draw on.

• Depth: increasing sophistication within each orientation.

• Fluency: the capacity to move deliberately between orientations as the situation demands.

A trainee in their first placement might mostly notice and teach adaptive ideation, with the occasional generative episode when they remember to plan a brainstorm. An experienced teacher might recognise within a single lesson that one pupil is doing abductive framing, another is doing combinatorial synthesis and a third is reasoning through their hands and respond differently to each. That second teacher is the goal of ITE and early-career development. Not an ECT who can run a transformation lesson. An ECT who can read the room and name what the eleven pupils in front of them are actually doing.

Don't apologise for adaptive ideation

If adaption sits at the bottom of an imagined hierarchy, and assessment rewards position on that hierarchy, then the sophisticated analytical work involved in skilled adaption (identifying which features of a source are load-bearing, which are contingent, what can be changed without breaking function) gets misread as a low-order activity. It isn't. Adaption is real epistemic work. This matters twice over for teacher educators: trainees inherit the hierarchy from their own school experience and will mark pupils down for it unless we name it explicitly in ITE; and mentors who only praise trainees for teaching the 'higher' types end up training teachers who can't recognise, let alone develop, the adaptive work most of their pupils will actually do.

Three moves to try this term

Audit one trainee's scheme of work, with them in the room. Take a scheme a trainee or ECT is currently teaching and, together, label which of the eleven ideation types each activity invites. Most schemes of work in English D&T heavily favour adaption, combination and generation, and rarely touch participation, collection, abduction, speculation or somaticisation. Absences are only a problem if they are inadvertent; a project legitimately scoped around adaptive ideation is fine, as long as the trainee knows that's what it is. The point of doing this together is that the audit develops the trainee's noticing, not just the scheme.

Build one ITE seminar or CPD session around an unfamiliar type. Pick a type that your trainees or department rarely encounters, and design a session in which they first experience the move themselves (as ideators), then plan a pupil activity around it, then discuss what they would notice and how they would respond. The six examples below are pupil activities, use them as the middle step:

• For abduction, send pupils to observe real users for fifteen minutes and bring back a “how might we…” that comes from something they saw, not something they were told.

• For transposition, give them a domain that has nothing to do with the brief (insect wings, queue management, sourdough fermentation) and ask what structural feature could transfer.

• For speculation, run a five-minute “what if this product refused to do its job?” task.

• For participation, have them write three questions for the actual user before they sketch anything.

• For somaticisation, ban paper for the first lesson and give them card, foam and tape.

• For collection, ask them to map every tool, platform and community their idea actually depends on (e.g. Tinkercad, YouTube tutorials, a particular forum) and treat those as part of the design.

Change one piece of mentor feedback. Next time a trainee tells you a lesson “went well… they all had ideas,” don't accept it at face value. Ask: “which of the eleven were they doing, and which did you plan for?” Where the answers don't match (a brief that invited generation but produced adaption, a task designed for combination that elicited speculation) that gap is the lesson the trainee actually taught. Naming it does two things at once: it teaches the trainee the vocabulary I argue is missing, and it gives both of you a sharper post-lesson conversation than “how do you think it went?” ever produces.

One last thing

The typology is a conceptual framework awaiting empirical work in classrooms and in teacher education. It is not a marking grid waiting to be applied, and it is not an ITE competency checklist either. The point isn't to label children (“you're a speculation-type” is not a useful sentence) or to label trainees (“you only teach adaption” is not much better). It is to widen the range of moves pupils have access to, which we do by widening the range of moves the teachers we train can recognise, name and respond to.

If we keep treating ideation as one thing in ITE and CPD, most of our trainees will keep teaching it as one thing; and most of their pupils will keep being marked down for thinking in ways no one asked for and no one taught.

Reference

McLain, M. (2026). The Name You Can Say Isn't the Real Name: A Typology of Ideation for Design and Technology Education. Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 31(2), 323-343. https://doi.org/10.24377/DTEIJ.article3641