Mantling in a home-learning way.

For much of the past year I - and  every other teacher in the country/world - have been adapting to Teaching Under Intermittent Lockdown. 

And, like every other school in the country/world, my school has been finding ways to deliver education at home. 

This started with a tentative blog of ideas for parents and their children. It moved on to a couple of compulsory tasks per day - maybe a maths game, maybe a phonics activity. More recently, since November, it has involved videoed maths and phonics lessons, spelling practice, maths facts practice, sentence writing, handwriting and other such core-subject things. 

Early on (from maybe the second week of school closure, back in March), I found teaching from home quite... uninspiring. I also found that some parents were struggling to motivate their children to do the work at home, because, well, home is home and school is school. I needed a way for children to become more interested in, motivated by and ultimately invested in their work. 

The answer, of course, was Mantle of the Expert.

Naturally, doing actual Mantle of the Expert was not entirely possible. However, I thought I might be able to write some sort of ongoing story, with drama elements and related tasks, which would keep the children interested and give their learning a purpose. After all, the best part of Mantle of the Expert (in my very humble opinion) is that it is all about stories. 

I started off with fairy tales. Prior to this, I begun a mantle based on Tim Taylor's Fairy Tale Problem Solvers. The children were already working as a team of problem solvers so I decided just to continue the story.  

Each day I would publish a new chapter of the story, like this one*. The children would complete the task and return it to me. It seemed to work well in terms of promoting children's interest and investment in their learning. 

However, it quickly became clear that, this way, children had much less influence over the direction of the story. While a genuine Mantle of the Expert team would be making decisions and leading the story's direction, my story chapters didn't leave much room for the children's ideas. This led me to thinking of ways I could implement the children's ideas and work into the subsequent chapters. Sometimes, this simply meant that that the children's work featured on a chapter (which motivated them and helped them to see they were part of the story).  At other times, the children's ideas would actually influence part of the story.

Some ideas that worked well:                     

• Inviting the team to create a herbivore menu for the Big Bad Wolf. The next chapter featured an image of a menu with the children's ideas on.
• Inviting the children to suggest ways to get a baby blue whale to follow their boat. The next chapter featured their ideas written into the story as the team got to work. 
• Inviting the children to investigate a burglary and write down any clues they found. The next chapter featured a pin board with some of their ideas on.

And a few that did not:

• Inviting children to set up CCTV cameras and report on the footage. Several of them 'solved the crime' - I hadn't managed to stick to my givens and had given them too much say in what happened.
• Some quite closed maths-based tasks. I wanted to ensure the children participated in some purposeful maths activities (such as setting out the right amount of food for a party in the story). However, while the activities were purposeful, they didn't move the story on and I was not able to involve the children so much in the story.

Using the conventions

To begin with I found myself simply writing the story and then inviting the children to complete a task, either in the middle of the chapter or at the end. After a while I experimented with some different conventions, including:

• An embedded recording of a message left on a phone
• A screen shot of an iPhone conversation
• A template of an email sent from one character to the expert team
• A video of 'the news' with a colleague of mine in role as the news reader
• Images taken from 'CCTV' (which the children had previously set up as one of their tasks

Feedback from parents indicated that they, and their children, enjoyed the use of these conventions and helped the children to look forward to the next chapter of the story.

It has not been true Mantle of the Expert. However, I've found that by using the key elements of Mantle (an expert team, a client and several commissions) the children have become more involved in their learning, as have the parents. When I was talking to the parents and children recently (via Zoom, naturally) every single child mentioned our current story as their favourite part of home learning. The parents also commented on how much fun they had been having as they stepped into the story with their children.

Once again, Mantle of the Expert was the answer to my school-based problem.

* (Note: I own none of the images but have only used this within my class and, as far as I know, have sourced free-to-use images).