Whipping Them in: Role-Playing Party Cohesion with a Chief Whip

We have used a role-play exercise to help students understand the role of the whips in British parliamentary politics, a subject with which students often struggle. In itself, this proved a valuable learning and teaching tool, but we found it became even more useful when we incorporated a practitioner into the exercise. This overcame some of the problems with role-play exercises but it also overcame some of the problems we have previously encountered with using practitioners in teaching. In this article, we outline our reasons for utilizing a role-play simulation and explain how it functioned. We then discuss the use of practitioners in teaching and learning and how the role-play overcame many of the problems we have previously encountered when using such teaching methods.

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