Given that the world of education should necessarily be open to fully appraising educational approaches and strategies, so that those with a positive impact might be integrated where appropriate more widely across the work of schools, I am always interested to explore ideas that are used with success around the country.
Mantle of the Expert is just such a strategy. Developed by Dorothy Heathcote, a renowned authority on drama for learning, at Newcastle University in the 1980s, Mantle of the Expert works, “by the teacher planning a fictional context where the students take on the responsibilities of an expert team. As the team, they are commissioned by a client to work on an assignment, which has been planned to generate tasks and activities that will involve them in studying and developing wide areas of the curriculum.” Introduction to Mantle of the Expert
Mantle of the Expert in practice
Tim Taylor, freelance teacher and author of “A Beginner’s Guide to Mantle of the Expert”, has extensive experience of using the strategy successfully in schools across the country. He explained, “Mantle of the Expert is about creating purpose in children’s learning, to make it feel urgent and important. Mantle creates stories set in imaginary contexts. Children take on a role of people who have expertise The “mantle” is a metaphor for the responsibility that experts have. So, for example, children in Year 3 were in a castle in need of restoration. The client commissions the team to do work inside the fiction. The client might be, for example, Welsh Heritage, that commissions a team of restorers. They go in and have a look around, put up some scaffolding and look at areas of interest. They may photograph it or draw pictures of what photos may look like, then they write to the client with their assessment of the situation.”
Narrative stories have a tension and that is what makes them urgent and important to us. They can be exciting. In Mantle of the Expert, teachers tell the children to take the context forward in a series of episodes, making sure that the learning has purpose. For example, if they are writing about castle design, the purpose is to communicate the castle’s design and history to visitors to the castle.
Taylor is keen to emphasise that Mantle of the Expert gives children an immediate purpose. You can dramatize the story; step into it and step out of it whenever you like. He said, “Children spend a lot of their time at school in a “waiting room” learning things that are not urgent today but that may become relevant at some later stage of their lives. Through Mantle, children create the pictures as if they are in them. It makes the world they are in much more exciting.”
From speaking to teachers who have used Mantle of the Expert in their teaching, it is clear that it gets children bothered; it gets them interested. They get excited. They are still exercising and practicing their writing skills, but they are invested.
Taylor feels that getting to the bottom of why Mantle of the Expert works so well would certainly be worthy of research. He explained, “It is a complex answer but one reason it works is that it engages the imagination, which is underused in education. The imagination is enormously engaging for children. It plays a really important role in the creation of narrative. Story is psychologically privileged. We can teach and learn abstract chunks of knowledge but if we put that into a narrative it is far more memorable. Our minds are designed to remember narratives. Mantle uses story, which is one reason why it is so successful. The other aspect is emotional investment. It is not just your mind that is engaged but your emotions too. Mantle uses the “enactive” (Jerome Bruner writes of the three ways we communicate meaning – language, iconic (drawing) and enactive (drama). Imaginative play is the very first way that children communicate meaning. That has to be hard-wired in us.”
Education reimagined
Drama and use of the imagination allows children to try situations out in a safe way. Taylor explained, “This happens in early years but once they learn to write a lot of this meaning making is lost in favour of sitting at a desk because we think that writing is the preferred way of conveying meaning. But imaginary settings are safe and exciting.”
I am intrigued, however, at the cynicism that is sometimes directed towards Mantle of the Expert in certain circles. Where does this cynicism come from? For Taylor, this might come from a desire to “keep things as they were.” He said, “I think in our system there is an awful lot of regression to the status quo. But education is so badly broken, we need to start again. SATs have played a huge part in our brokenness. It is not so much the weeks leading up to them that cause the problem as it is the focus on them that seems to begin in Year 1.”
Perhaps there are unintended consequences of education. “People in education are so often good people doing bad things for good reasons,” Taylor explained. In the world of schools where SATs are everything, too much in education does not have value. This is such a tragedy. We may claim to offer a world class education but we are poor compared with other countries. Mantle of the Expert challenges all of that thinking.”
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About the author
Elizabeth Holmes
After graduating with a degree in Politics and International Relations from the University of Reading, Elizabeth Holmes completed her PGCE at the Institute of Education, University of London. She then taught humanities and social sciences in schools in London, Oxfordshire and West Sussex, where she ran the history department in a challenging comprehensive. Elizabeth specialises in education but also writes on many other issues and themes. As well as her regular blogs for Eteach and FEjobs, her books have been published by a variety of publishers and translated around the world. Elizabeth has also taught on education courses in HE and presented at national and international conferences.
