Teachers as Innovators
Mantle of the Expert
Luke Abbott, Essex LEA
The work that Luke Abbott does in Essex is about tearing up the curriculum, and putting primary school pupils in charge of their learning by making lessons one long story time. The Mantle of the Expert ( www.mantleoftheexpert.com ) system is about having one long imaginary story line through which all learning is done.
Keywords: story-telling, imagination, simulation, themed fun
Abbott, who is a senior education advisor for Essex, explains the offhand way he'll introduce a new learning theme: “It's not an instruction system. Teachers use invitational language to get kids involved in the lesson. Say for example the theme is running a recycling centre: the teacher has got the class around them and a massive great big piece of paper on the floor. There's 30 pupils leaning round. The teacher draws a large box, which immediately gets kids asking: ‘what's that?’
“The teacher says, ‘I'm just drawing a bit of the recycling centre I'm running. Here's the door, here's the other gate’. The kids will start suggesting where things go and you go from there, before long they are deciding the whole system of recycling and sorting of rubbish.”
The teacher in this situation, he says, takes the role of being a bit useless, so the kids make all the suggestions. Before long they are labelling bins, researching different types of paper and what you can put with what. Or talking about different types of metals, and that's where the curriculum comes in. “There's always tension going on,” says Abbott. “I had a huge tree in my recycling centre. I said I thought there was something living up the tree. I don't know too much about wildlife but we need to take the tree down. The kids have make-believe binoculours and they find things: birds, owls, squirrels. Within five minutes we've got ladders and they are checking out what's up the tree. Then they are calculating how long the skips will take to fill up, and the cost involved compared to the volume of each. The next day they might be designing forms for the dump or writing letters to suppliers, then the literacy comes in.”
The process works for a hundred scenarios: it could be a railway company, a demolition company or a hairdressers. The challenge is for the teacher to have enough imagination and dramatic skills to keep one step ahead of a class of curious pupils. “The system is to make the classroom and learning more owned by the kids,” he says.
What's crucial is that the pupils understand the system: there is the work they do as a class inside the story, then the tangents they go on outside the story, when they start the maths part, or the research of the tins. So the teacher would say that they need to find out more about different materials and the pupils would move to using the internet to research.
The Mantle of the Expert system was designed by the educationalist Dorothy Heathcote from the 1950s, who described and practiced the use of drama in teaching. She was an innovator before her time, and 20 years after she retired her methods are beginning to have a widespread impact. Eight hundred schools are now signed up to the website (www.mantleoftheexpert.com) and more are getting involved every day outside Essex too.
Abbott says: “It's like educational jazz rather than the formal structure of classical music. Ofsted is powerfully behind it. It is motivational, the kids are interested and the parents keep running up saying ‘I don't know what you're doing but why is my kid going through the dustbin’. That's new. Kids taking it home with them like that.”
There are challenges: Abbott says it takes a completely different kind of planning to be ready for classes. When headteachers ask for a half-term's worth of planning it can be difficult when you don't know where the pupils' interests are going to take you. The only thing that most teachers don't fit in is PE, he says. Some of the themes he has followed in some schools for up to a year, but it's most commonly a matter of weeks or a term.
“The planning for teachers becomes stratified planning. Currently teachers have to say exactly how they will be teaching the subject. The teacher hands it in to the head and they can see what's happening, and the progress. The head can judge whether it will make any impact. This is much harder. You've got to trust the process that's happening. The head needs to know about the system, how it works and have an idea of the level of teacher expertise which is needed, which is very high.”
There are also challenges as head teachers worry about assessing pupils, but in schools which have pursued the method, standards are rising faster, claims Abbott. “You can ask any child under the sun who has had a go at this. Kids take to it like ducks to water. It makes sense to the kids. They like it, they enjoy it; their imagination is freed. They can meet catastrophic problems. Sick giants. They know how to fix them. Giant social workers.”
He says that all teachers who have the will could teach by Mantle of the Expert - or at least learn from it. But newly qualified teachers are sometimes unprepared by modern training, he claims. “I'm glad to say it's throwing some dirt in the establishment's eyes. This is a different way of doing things.”