In most role-playing exercises each student takes the role of a person affected by an issue and studies the impacts of the issues on human life and/or the effects of human activities on the world around us. More rarely, students take on the roles of non-human phenomena (e.g., an ecosystem) to demonstrate the lesson in an interesting and immediate manner.
- Processing focus: perspective
- Instructional phase: before and after exercise
- Response mode emphasized: oral or written discussion
- Strategy emphasized: immersion and understanding
- Skill emphasized: perspective learning
- Source of information: situational
- Type of instruction: guiding
- Define objectives. Consider what topics you want your exercise to cover, how much time you and your class have to work on it, and what is expected of your students.
- Choose context and roles. It is a good idea to make the setting realistic, but not necessarily real. Define the character(s) goals and what happens if the character does not achieve them. Work out characters’ background information or directions on how to collect the background information through research.
- Introduce the exercise. Describe the setting and the problem. Provide background information about the students’ characters and determine students’ experience with role-playing exercises. Outline expectations for the students and stress what you expect them to learn. Suggest strategies for research/problem solving if applicable.
- Have students prepare and/or research their roles. Help students understand the purpose of their exercise and how to become comfortable with their roles.
- Perform the role-playing exercise. Depending on the assignment, students could be writing papers or participating in a Model-UN-style summit.
- Engage in a concluding discussion. This allows students to define what they have learned and reinforce it. This can be handled in reflective essays or in a class discussion.
- Assess students’ performance. Grades can be given for written projects associated with role-play, presentations and involvement in interactive exercises. Special consideration may be given to playing in-character, being constructive and courteous in interactive exercises, being able to look at characters’ situation and statements from student’s own perspective or from another character’s perspective
- Role-playing is simultaneously interesting and useful to students because it emphasizes the “real-world” side of science.
- Challenges students to deal with complex problems with no single “right” answer and to use a variety of skills beyond those employed in a typical research project.
- In particular, role-playing presents the student a valuable opportunity to learn not only course content, but other perspectives on it. Instructors must carefully explain and supervise role-playing scenarios in order to involve the students and enable them to learn as much as possible.
- A well-done scenario never runs the same way twice, allowing people to learn things they might not ordinarily have learned and have fun in the process