Dorothy Heathcote has not written a great deal on the commission model. The article I find most useful is from the NATD conference in 2002, Contexts for Active Learning http://www.mantleoftheexpert.com/studying/articles.php in which she outlines four models she describes as ‘forging links between schooling and society’.

The four models are: Drama used to explore people; Mantle of the Expert; Rolling Role; and the Commission Model. The defining link between all four is what Heathcote calls ‘social politics’ that is they all establish, through close collaboration, communities of inquiry where ‘people business is central’.

In mantle of the expert the context is entirely fictional. The client, the commission to be fulfilled, the team of experts themselves, often even the ‘products’ the experts produce, are all invented within the imaginary setting. This allows enormous flexibility and potential. The class can be literally anyone, anywhere, at any time, doing anything. The only limits are their own imagination.

Of course, there are various responsibilities within the fiction, which prevent the work becoming frivolous, but essentially there are no penalties, no real-world clients to satisfy or disappoint.

In the commission model the work the children are engaged in ‘breaks-out’ into the real world. “The commission model carries the social element present in other models right out into the community beyond the school interests and environs.” The work the children are involved in is real work. There is always something to be published and presented at the end.

In Contexts for Active Learning Heathcote explains that although these commissions might come from outside the school, others, especially in the early stages can come from inside. These she calls ‘domestic’ and can be invented by the teachers to enable the children to explore particular areas of the curriculum. They might vary in size from the very small to the very large.

The more ambitious commissions, however, will come from outside of the school, from the wider community. They will demand high standards and high quality because their final publication will be submitted to the real world clients at the end of the work.

Heathcote is at pains to differentiate between this model of commissioning children’s work and ‘project work’ which she has no time for. The commission model, she argues, is different because it is underpinned by what she calls the ‘three teaching values’ built in from the start with all the participants, teachers and children. “These are rigour, responsibility and realisation.” Realisation, she maintains, is the most significant because it embodies a factor often missed out of schooling, “realising now what we have learned, can understand, and put to use in our lives, that previously we had not recognised.”

This idea is fundamental to Heathcote’s philosophy of teaching. Elsewhere she bemoans how modern schooling has denied children opportunities to establish their usefulness to society. How our current education system “requires children over many years to be content with an absence of status, to feel useless, to exist in a limbo of learning which relies solely on the de-functioning maxim that ‘one day, you’ll be good enough to really do it’ but never today.” (Quoted in G. Bolton, Dorothy Heathcote’s Story, pg. 126)

By using the commission model, she argues, schools will be able to develop organisations of emergent-design. These will “create learning cultures, by encouraging continual questioning and reward for innovation… creating conditions [for learning], rather than giving directions.”

Further drawing on this idea, from Fritzof Carpra, she argues that schools using this model will develop emergent structures that will adapt, develop and evolve as ‘expressions of the communities collective creativity’. They will incorporate methods of reflections, evaluation and change as they learn from their mistakes. They will create opportunities for children to be authentic agents in their own learning and to make genuine and valuable contributions both to school and the wider community.

“There are literally thousands of commissions waiting to be taken up so that schools and community become more and more and interdependent. I have this dream that if that could ever be possible children would not have to spend thirteen years of their lives being denied protected responsibility and without power to influence how they spend their time in school. Neither would they be expected to suddenly emerge at eighteen like Pallas Athena out of Zeus's head, as mature responsible members of their community. Mantle of the Expert and Rolling Role work allow them to test their capacities as maturing human beings, and certainly to demonstrate their interests and abilities. A commissions school would make a seamless link between the two worlds of work and active participation in learning together.”

Although the commission model is still evolving and changing, there does seem to be some defining characteristics that can be identified from this article:

1. Working as a community of learners is essential to the work.
2. The structure of this community is essentially emergent and leadership is defined in terms of the way it facilitates this emergent process. Leadership is not concentrated in the hands of one person, but is distributed throughout the community. The children are not ‘good little workers’.
3. The client is usually real. Although In the early stages of developing the use of the model it might be advantageous for teachers to invent clients in order to better ‘temper’ the work to suit the needs of the group, the time-span available and the curriculum to be explored.
4. The work is always built on the ‘3Rs’ – Rigour, Responsibility and Realisation.
5. The essential and defining distinction between mantle of the expert and the commission model is that in the commission model there is always a published outcome. Something that is made and presented in the real world, even if the client is fictional.
6. This is not drama, although drama is used (and we would recommend used extensively) to explore the different dimensions and possibilities inherent in the work of the commission.

For an example of a commission model that grew out of an original mantle of the expert inquiry please visit: The Escape of King Edward http://web.mac.com/timtaylor4/The_Escap ... /Home.html