“Have Some Ideas” Is Doing Too Much Work: Why Teacher Educators Need a Better Vocabulary for Ideation (Part 1 of 3)

Part 1 of a three-part series for D&T teacher educators, mentors and CPD leads. This part sets up the problem: ‘ideation’ has been doing far too much work, and it shapes what trainees can see in a lesson. Part 2 sets out the eleven types as a reference. Part 3 turns the typology into ITE and mentoring practice.

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

“Have some ideas” is doing too much work

You are observing a trainee's lesson. They have set a brief and asked for ideas. A few pupils fill a page with sketches that all look like the example the trainee showed. A few stare at the paper. One is fiddling with offcuts and not drawing anything. Another wants to interview their gran before they start. In the post-lesson conversation, the trainee says the lesson “went well… they all had ideas.”

All four are doing ideation. None of them are doing the same ideation. And the trainee can't yet see that.

In a recent paper, I argued that the term ‘ideation’ has been doing far too much work in D&T. It gets used as a catch-all for any moment when ideas are being had, and it gets used in assessment criteria as if it names one thing. It doesn't. I identified eleven different kinds of ideation, each grounded in a distinct way of knowing, each drawn from a different body of research. The paper opens with a line borrowed from the Tao Te Ching (‘the name you can say isn't the real name’) and that is the warning. The label ‘ideation’ hides more than it reveals.

This three-part series walks through the eleven types, the three axes they sit on, and what to do with them in your next mentoring conversation, ITE seminar or department CPD session. This first part stays with the underlying conceptual move (that ideation isn't one thing) and what follows from it for the way we frame trainee noticing. Parts 2 and 3 deal with the types themselves and what to do about them.

The three axes

In the article, I have organised the eleven categories along three independent dimensions.

• Epistemic orientation: what is the relationship between the idea and the problem frame? Is the pupil working inside the brief, reaching beyond it, or changing the brief itself?

• Social orientation: who is doing the thinking? One head, a group, a wider network, or the people who will actually use the thing?

• Mediational resources orientation: through what mode does the idea emerge? Words and sketches, or hands and materials?

These axes are independent. Any epistemic move can be done individually or socially, on paper or in card and PU modelling foam. A group can do adaptive ideation together. One pupil can do transformative ideation in foam. The dimensions don't collapse into a single ladder.

Don't confuse ideation with iteration

In the article, I spend time on this distinction, and it matters. Ideation is the generative moment, the producing of design propositions. Iteration is the temporal structure (an activity over time), the cycling of ideate-realise-critique sequences in which each pass feeds the next. ‘Iterative designing’ in current curriculum talk often collapses everything into one fuzzy term. Ideation and iteration are entangled, but they are not the same thing, and the typology only describes the first.

In Part 2, I work through the eleven types themselves, what each one is, where it lives in the research, and what it looks like in a pupil's folder. Treat it as a reference you can return to before an observation, a seminar or a mentoring conversation.

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