Mantle of the Expert

The mantle of the expert was established by Dorothy Heathcote in the 1980’. It is defined as a system for learning through active imagination and enquiry methodology. The children behave as if they are experts, they work from a specific point of view when they are learning which brings special responsibilities, language needs and social behaviours. Through the activities and tasks the children participate in they gradually take on some of the same kinds of responsibilities, problems and challenges that would be experienced by the real people who do the jobs they are pretending to do (What is MoE?, n.d.). I looked into the mantle of the expert further and from the research I did I define the mantle of the expert as an approach where all of the learning is done as if the class was a company or an enterprise. The learning begins by devising a company for the children to be part of, this captures the children’s imaginations. The teacher would base the company on the curriculum content. The next step is to build up a history of the company and explain to the children when it was first created, how many employees there are etc. so that the children buy into the idea of it. In the mantle of the expert there must always be a client and then learning is done in response to the needs of the client.

Over our seminars on the mantle of the expert we split into groups and within those groups created our companies whose area of expertise was designing and building bridges. We had to get into our individual roles within the company and come up with the history of our company and projects that we had previously worked on. After receiving an email from our potential client we held a meeting with them to discuss the client’s needs. After making a plan of how our bridge was going to be made and how it was going to look we started the construction of our bridge. Using the mantle of the expert approach to complete this task really helped us keep focus and take each of our roles seriously because it became realistic rather than just being talked at or asked to just simply research. After taking part in these seminars I can understand how using the mantle of the expert approach in classrooms would help the pupils learn, especially younger children as the can be very enthusiastic about becoming part of a company and completing something for a client.