Mantle of the Expert.com. A brief overview: The Mantle of the Expert is a dramatic-inquiry based approach to teaching and learning invented and developed by Professor Dorothy Heathcote at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1980’s.
The big idea is that the class do all their curriculum work as if they are an imagined group of experts. They might be scientists in a laboratory or archaeologists excavating a tomb, or a rescue team at the scene of a disaster. They might be running a removal company, or a factory, or a shop, or a space station or a French resistance group. Because they behave ‘as if they are experts’, the children are working from a specific point of view as they explore their learning and this brings special responsibilities, language needs and social behaviours. Let us be clear: the children are not putting on a play or running a business. “On-Task” is not a waypoint on the route to engagement SmartBlogs.
Can you recall a time when you were so engaged in learning that you became unaware of your surroundings, that each step of the process energized you to pursue your goal further, and the learning became its own reward?
Recently, I was working with a gathering of administrators from my county, contemplating the puzzle of student engagement. Most of the small groups in the room organized their exploration around the premise that on-task behavior is a necessary but insufficient step toward engagement. The T-charts they created focused on how an administrator observing a class might recognize subtle differences. It occurred to the team from my district, however, that perhaps we weren’t looking at a simple linear progression. “What if,” we proposed, “On Task and Engaged were two independent dimensions of student learning behavior?” Our district team had two insights as we created this diagram.
Second, teachers favor the left side of the chart. Gerald W. TeacherTalk « @TeacherToolkit. We all love to talk in the classroom!
Students disagree; and so do Ofsted. TeacherTalk can often be the root-cause of poor behaviour and debilitating progress during a lesson. More often than not, I’ve observed many lessons and have watched teachers ‘say all the right things’ during my time in their classrooms, hoping for me to tick a box!
Talking more, saying all the right things during an observation, reduces the opportunities for students to share, and in turn hinders their own learning process. Here is where the problem lies: Firstly, do not tick boxes. This page has evolved as a result of my own leadership of whole-school Teaching and Learning and as a priority we identified during 2011/12. As I collate ideas and strategies, I will post them here for editing and will create a document to share on TES Resources.
Strategies for reducing TeacherTalk You can leave a comment on my WallWisher Top Teacher-Talk strategies: Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning. If kids can access information from sources other than school, and if school is no longer the only place where information lives, what, then happens to the role of this institution?
“Our whole reason for showing up for school has changed, but infrastructure has stayed behind,” said Diana Laufenberg, who taught history at the progressive public school Science Leadership Academy for many years. Laufenberg provided some insight into how she guided students to find their own learning paths at school, and enumerated some of these ideas at SXSWEdu last week. 1. BE FLEXIBLE. The less educators try to control what kids learn, the more students’ voices will be heard and, eventually, their ability to drive their own learning.
Laufenberg recalled a group of tenacious students who continued to ask permission to focus their video project on the subject of drugs, despite her repeated objections. 2. Laufenberg’s answer: Get them curious enough in the subject to do research on their own. 3. 4. 5. Why Inquiry Learning is Worth the Trouble. Visualization of SLA principal Chris Lehmann's 2011 talk: guiding kids' to thinking about how they think.
Nearly seven years after first opening its doors, the Science Leadership Academy public magnet high school* in Philadelphia and its inquiry-based approach to learning have become a national model for the kinds of reforms educators strive towards. But in a talk this past weekend at EduCon 2.5, the school’s sixth-annual conference devoted to sharing its story and spreading its techniques, Founding Principal Chris Lehmann insisted that replicating his schools approach required difficult tradeoffs. “This is not easy. This is not perfect,” Lehmann told a crowd of devotees stuffed inside one of the Center City school’s second-floor science classrooms on Sunday. “There are really challenging pieces of this, and we should be OK with this.” “Inquiry means living in the soup. “To me it comes down to process,” Lehmann said. “Oh God, yeah,” Lehmann said in response to the latter teacher. Related.