Role-Playing

This note introduces the concept of role-playing methods in teaching. Intended primarily for a doctoral seminar on pedagogy, the note would also be appropriate for instructors wishing to examine their teaching style or to use role-playing in their teaching. Excerpt UVA-PHA-0054 ROLE-PLAYING Role-playing is a very useful teaching technique that can bring abstract situations to life for students, push them to focus on significant details they otherwise might ignore, help them to see other points of view, help them see the differences between concept and reality, provide on-the-spot variety in the classroom, give enormously useful data to an instructor, and stimulate learning by bringing conceptual discussions alive. Because of these benefits and the facts that role-plays are flexible and can be set up extemporaneously as the opportunity arises or can be planned for and managed well in advance, they are a teaching tool you should be familiar with and be able to use well. This chapter will outline some of the benefits of role-playing and address some important role-playing issues, such as when to use it, how long to use it, how to choose students to participate, how to set role-plays up, how to assign roles, and how to debrief effectively. Benefits of Role-playing Role-plays can dramatically and immediately galvanize a sleepy class into one charged with attention and the electricity of concentrated learning. The pressure of having to present one's ideas in a simulated but live conversation often causes students to think more deeply, more quickly, and more emotionally than they do when they present their ideas in the abstract as part of an analysis Role-plays are an excellent avenue for bringing abstract discussions, especially action planning, alive for students. Without role-plays, students can easily gloss over the implementation issues in their action plans, leaving the plans as mental and experiential concepts instead of realistic agenda. When students remain concerned only with the concepts, they often talk in poorly examined abstractions and assumptions (about, for instance, how others will respond to their requests). Students may assume, for example, that they can move easily from one step to the next in their action plans, that they will get approval for their suggestions, that abrasive personalities will melt before their persuasiveness, that strong conflict will evaporate under their guidance, that a key supporter will materialize at the right moment, and even that they can hire a replacement in a day's time. This is lazy thinking, and it bores the listeners, leaving them and the rest of the class, as well as the speaker, insensitive to the realities of getting something done through other people. . . .