She was a highly accomplished teacher of theatre and drama for learning and amongst her many achievements she defined and developed "mantle of the expert" as an approach to teaching.
The most significant previous book that explains her approach was written by Betty Jane Wagner and was entitled Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium.
After failing her eleven-plus exam she studied at the local elementary school, leaving in July 1940, a month before her 14th birthday, to work alongside her mother as a weaver in a woollen mill.
But at the end of her second year Esme Church told her she had no future on the stage, "My dear, you're very talented – quite fearfully so at times, but you are not the right size for your age, for the roles you can play… I think we have to face it.
She also started teaching evening classes at the Bradford Civic, and directing amateur productions in local village halls.
Gavin Bolton has suggested that towards the end of the 1960s Heathcote's work experienced what he calls a sea change, as she "moved away from her dramatically and educationally successful use of making up a play, to being a creator of pictures in which she became a fellow reader along with the class.
"I introduced mantle of the expert work when I was trying to help teachers who didn't understand creating tension by being playwrights and to cut out the need for children having to act, or express feelings and behave like other people".