Mantle of the Expert

Mantle of the Expert is a reversal of roles, it is where the children become the 'expert' and they are the ones who know all about the subject or activity they are doing. This approach allows children to take on the role of someone else and experience their job, this allows the children to enquire about the role and what activity they will be carrying out. Prendiville and Toye (2000)  state that Mantle of the expert allows children to become creative within their learning as they can choose the role they want to explore. This approach allows children to communicate on many social levels. Prendiville and toye (2000) explain that it allows children to take responsibility of their own learning and develop their own learning outcome. Mantle of the expert is not used in groups as such in schools, the only time i have seen mantle of the expert in schools is during role play. Mantle of the expert is a part of drama/ role play as the children are taking on another role. The benefit of doing a big class activity using mantle of the expert is that the children will learn to communicate their ideas to each other and share their creativity through their ideas.

The letter

We carried out a mantle of the expert activity where we were a part of a 'construction' team and we had to build a bridge. There were limitations of the activity, we had to use as little lolly pop sticks and sticks of glue as possible. Each lolly pop stick was 10p each and each glue stick used was 50p each. We had a total of 100 lolly pop sticks and 5 glue sticks available. Also the bridges had to be no longer than 30cm and no higher than 5cm. We were put into groups and each group had to come up with a plan of the costs and a diagram of the bridge, and then build the bridge. After all the bridges were built they were then tested for their strength using a gold ball. The bridge that had the lowest costs and also the most strongest won. They were scored on five aspects, these were the cost, strength, length, width and appearance.

 



           These were the outcomes of the three bridges.