Wood co-authored “The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving” with Jerome S. Bruner and Gail Ross in 1976, the paper that coined and defined scaffolding [1]. The paper’s own byline credits him to the University of Nottingham, distinct from Bruner’s Harvard and Ross’s Oxford [1] — a joint effort across institutions, and Wood is the name Nottingham’s own department later claims as its own.
Nottingham’s claim on him held for the rest of his career, not just one paper. A 2018 School of Psychology department item names him “Emeritus Professor David Wood” [2]. In 1992 he won an ESRC (a UK research-funding body) centre grant to found the Centre for Research in Development, Instruction and Training, which became Nottingham’s Learning Sciences Research Institute a decade later [3] — a researcher building a programme, not a one-paper name.
That programme was developmental and educational psychology, not management. He wrote the textbook How Children Think and Learn (Wiley-Blackwell, 1988; 2nd ed. 1998), whose own publisher page identifies him as “Professor of Psychology at the University of Nottingham” [4]. He also co-authored Teaching and Talking with Deaf Children (Wiley, 1986) [5], extending the same question — how support and language shape a child’s learning — into deaf education.
Wood sits at the adjacent end of the spectrum for management: nothing in his record concerns organizations, leadership, or work. His authority is narrow and specific — the mechanics of scaffolding, the term he co-named [1] — and Management Craft borrows it for Defining Roles, where a first-time manager’s template (a job description, a scorecard) works the same way a tutor’s support does: calibrated to what the manager can’t yet do alone, tapering as competence grows. His word carries real weight on that specific mechanism. It carries none on how a manager should run a team.