“The pupils love it but I’m having problems really linking their work as detectives to the lesson objectives. It seems like two separate things at the moment.”

It is certainly difficult to reconcile the conflicting tension between, on the one hand, a view of the curriculum as emergent, negotiated in the classroom and, on the other, a view of the curriculum as objectives-lead, structured and pre-planned by the teacher.

At its most fundamental, mantle-of-the-expert is about sharing learning with the children. It is a community of inquiry approach were the situation; the enterprise; and the commission are co-constructed in collaboration between everyone in the community - adults and children. For this reason it is an open-ended and flexible way to work because the teacher has to be very responsive to the children and their ideas.

It is also quite a risky way to work because the teacher can’t know exactly how things are going to work out or what learning will emerge from the situation. There is an element of faith here, a belief that the learning, co-constructed during a moe session, will go beyond what he/she could plan for and that it will be more valuable for the children because it is contextual and embedded in a social environment.

Learning in a community of inquiry is a cultural mediation between people sharing a common experience. Not a form of transmission between someone who knows more and group of people who know less.

For this reason, pre-contrived learning objectives, shared with the children at the start of a session, are problematic for mantle-of-the-expert because they assume that the adult has a preconception of the session’s outcomes and because they clearly sign to the children their lack of agency or voice in the process. Not, I am sure, your intention.

Nevertheless, we have to be careful here not to give the impression that learning using mantle-of-the-expert is incidental and can’t be planned for or that the teacher has no power in the classroom to influence the direction of the session.

When planning a mantle-of-the-expert frame, what you want the children to learn, experience and understand are always the first considerations. The next step is to invent a coherent situation/scenario where this learning can happen. Within this planning there will always be certain ‘givens’, things that have to be non-negotiable.

The ways you introduce these non-negotiable elements to the children need to be subtle and coherent. Dorothy Heathcote calls this process ‘induction’ because it is done generously, with the agreement of the children. You are, in effect, building a contract with them, a contract where you all agree to the fiction and the limits and boundaries of the imagined world.

Beyond these ‘givens’ there is flexibility and room for ideas and negotiation. The teacher has to be open to these, while, at the same time, keeping an eye on the direction of the inquiry. If things are moving too far away from the original aims then there will be the need for discussion to get things back on track.

In effect you are always moving backwards and forwards along a continuum where at one end the curriculum is open and emergent and on the other where the curriculum is closed and prescribed. It is a challenging and complex environment, but highly dynamic and productive.

In order to make the outcomes more predictable it is a good idea to plan between five and ten steps or ‘posts’ into the story, which you can return to during the session as the next thing to happen. In between these events you can afford to explore different possibilities with the children, knowing you have something ‘up your sleeve’ to come back to.

It may help if you think of it as being a bit like telling a tradition story like Red Riding Hood. In Red Riding Hood certain things have to happen and they have to happen in a certain order. The little girl must be asked by her mother to go to her grandma’s; she must meet the wolf in the woods; the wolf must get to grandma’s house first; etc. etc. These are the posts of the story, the things that carry the narrative forward; they are pre-planned and have to happen. However, in-between the posts the story-teller can invent as much as she/he likes. Red Riding Hood, skipping through the forest, might first meet a bear in a cave or fall down a rabbit hole, or meet her father chopping wood. It wouldn’t really matter because shortly she is going to meet the wolf and the story will carry on. Billy Connolly is a master at adlibbing in this way within the structure of his jokes.

On the planning page of the site the A3 planning flowcharts could help you with this kind of planning. I could send you some other examples too, if that would help.

One other point, when evaluating a session, it is a good idea to make a list of all the learning that happened, both the learning you expected from your planning AND the learning you didn’t expect, but that emerged from the situation.

In this way you can plan for the learning you want and remain flexible to opportunities that emerge from the moment and come from the children.

What you won’t be able to do is share the Learning Objectives at the start of the session and say: “This is what you are going to be learning today.” Mantle of the Expert can’t work that way.

However, you will need to draw attention to and reflect upon the learning as it is happening with the children. You can stop the session at any point and evaluate (particularly with Year 5s). Possibly drawing up a list of the learning together.