[ ROLE PLAY ]

ROLE PLAY

ABSTRACT: - Role playing can be used to forecast decisions, such

as “how will our competitors respond if we lower our prices?” In
role playing, an administrator asks people to play roles and uses
their “decisions” as forecasts. Such an exercise can produce a
realistic simulation of the interactions among conflicting groups.
The role play should match the actual situation in key respects,
such as the role-players should be somewhat similar to those
being represented in the actual situations, and role-players
should read instructions for their roles before reading about the To assume or act out a
situation. Role playing is most effective for predictions when two particular role
conflicting parties respond to large changes. A review of the
evidence showed that role playing was effective in matching
results for seven of eight experiments. In five actual situations,
role playing was correct for 56 percent of 143 predictions, while
unaided expert opinions were correct for 16 percent of 172
predictions. Role-playing has also been used successfully to
forecast outcomes in three studies. Successful uses of role
playing have been claimed in the military, law, and business.

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A Project Report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the Degree

In
Bachelor of Technology
In
(Electronic Communication & Engineering )
By

RAVIPATI SRIKANTH ……………………………………………………08KP1A0453

PINNIBOYINA HAREESH ……………………………………………......08KP1A0449
SHEIKH ASHABI ………………………………………………………….08KP1A0457
PARELLA AMARNADH ………………………………………………….08KP1A0444

Under the guidance of

Smt: TULASI,
Professor

NRI INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

(Affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Kakinada)

Gundlapalem, Medikoduru (M) 522009

Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh

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 ROLE PLAY 2011

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that this dissertation entitled as ‘ROLE PLAY’ is the bonafide work of

1) RAVIPATI.SRIKANTH 2) PINNIBOYINA.HARISH 3) SHAIK.ASHABI and 4) PERALLA.AMARNADH,

submitted to the Department of Electronic Communication and Engineering, NRI Institute of Technology,

during (2008-2012) in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the Degree in Bachelor of

Technology in Electronic Communication and Engineering.

Signature of Head Of The Department Signature of Lab In charge

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 ROLE PLAY 2011

DECLARATION FORM

We, the students of NRI Institute of Technology, Gundlapalem, Medikonduru (M), Guntur District, Andhra

Pradesh, hereby declare that this Project Work titled as ‘ROLE PLAY’, being submitted to the

Department of Electronic Communication and Engineering of this Institute, affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru

Technological University, Kakinada, for the award of the Degree in Bachelor of Technology in Information

Technology is a record of bonafide work done by us.

Signature of the Students

1) RAVIPATI SRIKANTH (08KP1A0453)___________________________________________

2) PINNIBOYINA HARISH (08KP1A0449)__________________________________________

3) SHAIK ASHABI (08KP1A0457)_________________________________________________

4) PARELLA AMARNADH (08KP1A0444)___________________________________________

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INDEX

S.NO TOPIC NAME Page No:

1. INTRODUCTION TO ROLE PLAYS 1

2. TYPES OF ROLE PLAYS 8

3. A ROLE-PLAYING GLOSSARY 12

4. USES OF ROLE PLAY 15

5. HOW IT WORKS 28

6. ROLE PLAYS OBJECTIVES 32

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INTRODUCTION TO ROLE PLAY:-

Role-playing is getting together with some friends to write a story. It’s joining
around a campfire or a dining room to spin some tall tales. Role-playing is being creative
and having fun with friends.

Role-playing games are stories. You create one of the main characters, and you
create a story around your character. The rest of the players also create stories around
their characters. And there’s an editor who brings those stories together.

In most role-playing games, one person plays the “referee,” who can be thought of
as the “Editor” of the story. The Editor will, with input from you if you desire to give any,
describe a world or setting. You and your friends, as Players, will take a character and
protagonist in this world. You will guide your character through the story that you and
your friends are creating.

Each player takes a different character, and each character interacts with each
other character. Role-playing, in this sense, is very much play-acting in the mind. You
imagine what the Editor describes. Then, you imagine your character’s response to this
situation, and describe that to the Editor and the other Players. They, in turn, each do the
same with their characters.

In most games--board games, card games, and dice games--there is a clearly

defined way to win, and a clearly defined way to lose, and winning is the goal of the
game. In role-playing games, the concepts of “winning” and “losing” do not exist. Your
goal as a Player is to help create a story and to have fun. You may give your character
other goals, but the success of your character does not determine any sense of “winning”
or “losing.” Like life, it’s not so much whether you win or lose, but how you play the
game.

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That’s all well and good, you say, but what actually goes on? What do these
“characters” do?

Most of the time, characters are involved in adventures, adventures of the type
that are immortalized in adventure movies and serial novels. In one game, the characters
might be a group of secret agents trying to save the world from nuclear destruction. In
another, you might play a rebel force, trying to overthrow an evil star-spanning empire.
You might play a group of warriors in eleventh century Europe, or King Arthur’s knights,
or Superman, or Batman, or an original character you create, in any world you choose.

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TYPES OF ROLE PLAYS:-

Role-playing can be thought of as unstructured drama in these exercises, a
student looks at the topic from the perspective of a character, which will affect and be
affected by the topic. The instructor provides the setting and the characters, but the
students have to decide their characters' lines and directions. Generally, the students will
need to do some research to make informed decisions from their characters'
perspectives. This research opportunity can easily become an inquiry element.

The character might be a miner trying to figure out how to stake a claim and to
make his or her fortune off of it or an engineer who wants to build a space probe.
Alternatively, the character could be an organism that is part of a food web and the
student's job is to work out his or her relationships to the other members of the food web
(role-played by classmates).

Role-playing exercises teach skills that are often assumed to be learned outside
of the classroom (and sometimes aren't), and how to use those skills to complement
scientific knowledge. These exercises require the students to use imagination,
background knowledge appropriate to the character being role-played, and
communications skills.

There are mainly two different types of role play .They are

1. Individual Role play

2. Interactive Role play

Individual Role-Play:

The students’ research and write about or present the issue being studied in a
format appropriate to the character they've been assigned: a letter to the editor, or a
report to the board of a corporation. The challenge for these exercises is for the student
to "get into character", to accept and work in the role that they've been assigned,
especially if their character is very different from them.

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Typical individual role-play scenarios:

For example, students could have a general lecture on groundwater depletion and
recharge and then research and write a short paper from the perspective of a modern
California farmer about groundwater and problems associated with it.

Interactive Role-Play:

These are group projects that range from simple brainstorming exercises or
scripted demonstrations to in-character debates or problem-solving exercises dealing
with environmental or geosciences topics. These lessons may include individual
assignments to prepare the students for their roles and for the project as a whole. It is
easier for students to get into character and stay there with help from their classmates,
but keeping the debate friendly and productive can be challenging.

Typical interactive role play scenarios:

One of the most common scenarios and one that will be relevant to many
students' lives is to give them the roles of stakeholders in a zoning decision that will be
resolved at a town meeting. For example, some students would be developers, others
landowners, scientists, or environmental advocates.

An interesting variant on this scenario is to have the students role-play

stakeholders in a judicial decision in a hearing that follows some kind of disaster or
discovery, such as a flood or a new gold mine.

You Become Involved with Role-Play:

The same way you’d get involved with any other game. You either find some
people who are already playing, or you start a game yourself. The former is
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recommended, but either way is fun. The first thing is to figure out what you want to play.
What kind of movies or books do you want to copy? That’s what you want to play. There
are games that deal with H.P. Lovecraft’s novels, Michael Moorcock novels, and the
middle-earth of J.R.R. Tolkien, among many others. There are also generic games that
cover whole genres--espionage, detective, super-hero, swords and sorcery, space
opera, and the old west, for example.

Next, find a store that sells role-playing games. You can find them in the yellow
pages under “games.” Visit the store and tell them you don’t know much about role-
playing games, but you’d like a game that can play (insert your choice here--detective,
Tolkien, whatever). Ask if they know of any groups that are already playing that type of
game. Many stores keep a list or bulletin board of gamers looking for new gamers.
Chances are the store’s salespeople will be able to help you find just what you’re looking
for.

You look out for when you’re playing:

Cecil Adams author of the newspaper column, The Straight Dope said with
regards to role-playing games: "a lifetime of Parcheesi does not adequately prepare you
for this." He’s right. Your biggest problem will be breaking out of the straightjacket that
games like Parcheesi, Chess, and Poker have put you in. There are no “moves” in role-
playing games, nor are you confined to any specific actions. You make choices for your
character as creatively as if you were writing a book. You don’t need to be worried about
whether or not you are “allowed” to do something. The only thing restricting what your
character can do is the situation your character is in.

It is also sometimes easy to get into an adversarial relationship with your Editor.
Why? Because you are playing the “hero” and the Editor will be portraying all of the
“villains” that the hero meets. It helps sometimes to stop and remember that this is not a
competition between the Players and the Editor. The goal is to have fun, creatively,
together. If you want an adversarial competition, you can always play hockey.

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Once you realize that role-playing games have rules you might fall into one of two
“rules-lawyer” traps. Games have rules that explain what happens when, for example,
your character is attacked by a dragon, or what happens when two space vessels race to
the same destination. But these rules are almost always there as guidelines. They
describe what normally should happen, not what always must happen. The first rules-
lawyer trap is to always insist on following the rules, even when there’s an obvious
discrepancy between how all of the Players including the Editor want the game to
proceed, and how a certain game rule says an event should turn out. The overall game
should be more important than any specific rule.

Many times, games will not have a specific rule to cover a rare or odd situation.
The second rules-lawyer trap is to believe that there should always be a rule to cover
every situation. In this case, you waste time and interrupt the flow of the story by
searching through the rule-book for rules that aren’t there.

A related trap is to consider the Editor to be some sort of omnipotent being in

relation to the game, and to consider the game world to be the Editor’s world alone. The
game is for all the Players, not just the Editor. The Editor is, however, the final arbiter of
game disputes and game questions. There’s no need to waste time arguing when you
could be playing!

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A ROLE-PLAYING GLOSARY

If you decide to find a role-playing group to create with, you’ll probably run into
some strange terminology. Every group has its own terminology, and “gamers” are no
exception. Here is a quick guide to the most common jargon in role-playing.

Dice I’ll bet you thought you knew what dice were, didn’t you? Well, you’ll never
see so many different kinds of dice than when you meet up with role-playing gamers.
The kinds of dice that most people use (for Yahtzee or gambling) are “six-sided” dice.
They’ve got six sides. There are also four-sided dice, eight-sided dice, ten-sided dice,
twelve-sided dice, and twenty-sided dice. Some companies are even making thirty-sided
dice and hundred-sided dice. Don’t worry at first, though. Most games use either six-
sided dice (the normal, cube things) or ten-sided dice. You can borrow the latter from
someone else while you’re still new. Some veteran gamers do the same thing.

How do you use the dice? You’ll hear lots of strange terminology, like “roll a three-
Dee-six,” “roll a percentile die,” or “roll Dee-one-hundred.” The best way to deal with this,
if you don’t understand, is to look confused and say “huh? Show me.” Gamers (like any
other group) sometimes forget that newcomers aren’t privy to the jargon they use.
However, if you want some idea of what’s going on, here’s the dope:

Three-Dee-six: This is written 3d6. This means take three 6-siders and roll them.
Add them all up. If you roll 3 on one die, 4 on another, and 1 on the last, that’s 3 plus 4
plus 1, or 8. In general, when someone says “roll number Dee another number”, they
want you to take “a number” dice with “another number” sides, roll them, and add them
together. “Two-Dee-ten” or 2d10 means roll two ten-sided dice and add them, for
example.

Dee-one-hundred: This is a special kind of roll, designed just to confuse people

who think they understand the previous paragraph. When you are asked to roll Dee-one-

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hundred written d100, you’ll need a ten-sided die. Roll it, and remember the number.
This is the “tens.” Then, roll it again. This is the “ones.” If you rolled a 1 and a 5, the
result is 15. If you rolled a 6 and a 3, the result is 63. If you rolled a 0 and a 2, the result
is 2 (02), etc. If you rolled a 0 and a 0, the result is 100. Don’t ask its tradition. You want
a number from 1 to 100, not 0 to 99.

Dungeon Master In the first role-playing game, the characters usually had their
adventures in deserted castles and the dungeons below them. The Editor in these
games was called by the incredibly kinky name Dungeon Master. From this came the
equally pretentious Game Master, used by other games to denote the Editor. I prefer the
family of names that includes Referee, Supervisor, and, of course, Editor.

Hack and Slash Hack and Slash are a form of role-playing where the character’s
goal is to fight. Often, “hack and slash” characters will get in a fight with every non-player
character that they meet. Hack and Slash involves very little character interaction.

Hit Points Your character can interact with all sorts of things in a role-playing
game. Sometimes, your character will interact with fists, broken bottles, guns, or swords.
When you interact with a gun, you’re likely to either die or be seriously injured. Not so
with your character. In the serial adventures which role-playing games most commonly
emulate, the heroes rarely have to hobble along with punctured lungs or gangrenous
wounds. So, in most role-playing games, your character will have a certain number of “hit
points.” When your character is attacked with a weapon, the weapon will cause your
character to lose some of these hit points. This is much easier to play with than wounds,
broken bones, cranial injuries, and infections.

Hit points are called different things by different games Body Pips, Wound Level,
Energy Level, Damage Points, etc., but they’re still hit points. You lose them or gain
them when you get hit.

Miniatures some games use cute little miniature figurines, about an inch high, to
show where the characters are in relation to each other.

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Non-Player Character All of the characters played by you and your friends except
the Editor are Player Characters. That’s because a Player is playing them. Characters
created by the Editor for your character to meet are Non-Player Characters. Player
Characters are the stars of the story, and Non-Player Characters are the supporting cast
and the extras.

Saving Throws Saving Throw is an archaic term that basically refers to “saving”
your character with the “throw” of the dice. In the beginning of role-playing games,
“saving throw” often meant just that. If your character was bitten by a snake, and you
failed your “saving throw,” your character died, and you started playing a new character.
Nowadays, this sort of instant death is frowned on in games, but saving throws still exist
to help your character avoid other dangers in the game. You might roll a saving throw to
avoid your character falling off a cliff when pushed, or to realize that someone has picked
your character’s pocket.

How do you make or fail a saving throw? You roll dice if the dice are above or
below, in some games a certain number, you have succeeded, and whatever dire fate
could have happened has been avoided. Otherwise, you have failed the saving throw,
and your character is subject to whatever was about to happen.

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USES OF ROLE PLAY

Uses of Role-Playing Exercises:

"There are three sides to every story:

Yours and mine and the cold, hard truth."
- Don Henley ("Long Way Home", I Can't Stand Still, 1982)

The problem with teaching pure, undiluted information is that afterwards, the
students, if they paid attention, will be left asking "What is it for? What does it mean?"
Role-playing enables them to start answering these questions and to start expanding
them: "What does it mean to a farmer in Nigeria, to a coal miner in Ohio, to an oak
population in the Balkans." Information, alone, rarely makes people change their minds,
but personal experience often does. Role-playing, like any good inquiry approach,
transforms the content of education from information into experience.

Motivating Students:

The creative aspect of the exercise will make it seem more like play than like work. The
pressure to solve a problem or to resolve a conflict for their character can motivate a
student far more than the sort of pressure that they usually face preparing for an exam,
and it is far more typical of the pressure that will be on them in real life.
Role-playing exercises are particularly useful in courses for non-majors to emphasize the
intersection between science and daily life. Popular geosciences role-playing scenarios
generally deal with hazards and environmental issues that combine natural and social
sciences.

Augmenting Traditional Curricula:

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The primary purpose of role-playing exercises is to get students to look at the

material they are learning in a new light. The instructor is persuading them to alter their
mental maps of the world instead of just filling them in (Blatner, 2002 ).
Role-playing exercises show the world as a complex place with complicated problems
that can only rarely be solved by a simple answer that the student has previously
memorized (Cage 1997 ).

Additionally, the students learn that skills they learn separately (such as quantitative and
communications skills) are often used together in order to accomplish many real-world
tasks (Bair, 2000 ).
Adding a sympathetic, generally human element to science is often encouraging
to students with science and math anxiety. Lessons can use role-playing to emphasize
the value of feelings and of creativity as well as of knowledge dolman.
Exercises emphasizing the importance of people and their viewpoints are important
preparation for students who will go on in many professions, including business,
academia, and politics.

Real-World Skills:

Students need to understand the needs and perspectives of the people around
them to get through life, and to understand themselves.
Role-playing exercises can be used to develop skills important inside and outside
of science: the kind of skills needed to make learned information useful in the real world.
Many of these are very difficult to teach using more traditional methods of instruction:
self-awareness, problem solving, communication, initiative, teamwork (Blunter).

If an assignment includes research or problem solving, students are more likely to

retain knowledge that they have constructed themselves more than that simply handed
to them in lecture (Havholm, 1998 ; Devein and Solomon, 1994 ).

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Bonnet, 2000 tried, with some success, to instill ethics in school children using role-
playing.
Accounting students from the University of Illinois had an easier time finding jobs
after completing a curriculum that included role-playing than they did after the traditional
curriculum (Cage, 1997 ).

Use Individual Role-Playing Projects :-

Motivating Students:

 Even if students are not excited by the assigned topic, they should be able to
understand why it is important and to whom it is important.

Augmenting Traditional Curricula:

 As with any role-playing exercise, the most important task is to understand the topic
from new perspective.
 Among the pressing questions for any science class is: What do people need to know
about the environment in order to live there or about resources in order to work with
them? Above all, what do people need to know about each other?
For example: someone moving to Tacoma, Washington, needs to know about the risk of
Mount Rainier erupting and destroying their home, possibly killing their family. So they
have to find out about the nature of the hazard(s) posed by Mount Rainier, the
geographic extent, the likelihood of eruption according to geologic monitors, etc. Do they
want to work and live in Tacoma at all? Are some parts of the city that are safer than
others?

Real-World Skills:

 Most of the writing and presenting projects the student will do after graduation will not
be done from an objective viewpoint. However, an academic role-playing exercise can

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emphasize that scholarly journal and magazine articles are vital for researching policy
and persuasive writing. For controversial topics, materials ordinarily considered biased
by scientists, such as editorials, are also valuable for research, as they are in the real
world.
 On the average, students need to know how to write a good letter more than they
need to know the half-lives of uranium and lead isotopes, but a lesson that has a student
writing a letter to the editor of his hometown paper about the problem of nuclear waste
can teach both in context.
 Public speaking is an important skill in countries where most citizens have free
speech and important issues to address. Students need to be able to defend their
opinions in order to make good use of their rights.
 Given a particular problem, students should be able to decide which topics to
research in pursuit of a solution, because this is expected in all but menial jobs. The
ability to ask the right questions and then to independently research them is rarely
expected in undergraduates in introductory courses, but if this is the last science class
they are likely to take, make it count!

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Use Interactive Role-Playing Projects:

“ People who use their erudition to write for a learned minority ... don't seem to me
favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture.”
- Desideratum Erasmus (Praise of Folly, ch. 50, 1509)

Motivating Students:

These exercises are generally fun for students, as they contain social, creative and
sometimes competitive elements.
 Properly run, they are student-centered, open-ended, and feel more like real life than
lectures and tests.
 Students perceive interacting with small groups to be easier than writing for the
instructor or presenting to the whole class. However, poor preparation on advance
research will prove embarrassing and let down teammates and allies.

Augmenting Traditional Curricula:

 A distinct role can help a student focus an analysis of both sides of a controversy,
although in this case it is often helpful for an instructor to follow up at the end of the
assignment and ask the student his or her own, out-of-character, assessment of the
controversy. Additionally, some role-playing exercises will make time for students to
switch sides and try the opposite role from the one explored previously, an opportunity
the real world can rarely offer.
 Collaborative problem-solving exercises offer an opportunity for informal assessment.
Francis and Byrne (1999) found that instructors were able to identify which parts of the
course material that students were having trouble with during an interactive role-playing
exercise before giving students a graded test.

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Real-World Skills:

 Teamwork is one of the important social skills that these exercises can teach. Often
the students must combine information gathered by different groups and apply it. If
assigned research in advance, the team can divide a project up and have each piece be
the province of a different team member.
 Cooperation and persuasion will require the students to practice courtesy. In any role-
play with an interactive component, the instructor can (and should) include formal and
informal training in conflict management and consensus-building and the students must
of necessity learn tolerance or at least civility.
 In order to devise win-win solutions or compromises that other characters will accept,
they'll need to figure out those other characters' goals. Empathy is key to enlightened
self-interest as well as a virtue in its own right.
 A debate, as part of the lesson or as a consequence of different approaches to
problem-solving, will enable the students to develop effective rhetorical techniques, both
through practice and by offering them the opportunity to observe one another's efforts.
Effective and ineffective arguments make a good topic for the follow-up discussion: what
worked and what didn't?
 Even if students are not excited by the assigned topic, they should be able to
understand why it is important and to whom it is important .
 As with any role-playing exercise, the most important task is to understand the topic
from new perspective.
 Among the pressing questions for any science class is: What do people need to know
about the environment in order to live there or about resources in order to work with
them? Above all, what do people need to know about each other?

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 Most of the writing and presenting projects the student will do after graduation will not
be done from an objective viewpoint. However, an academic role-playing exercise can
emphasize that scholarly journal and magazine articles are vital for researching policy
and persuasive writing. For controversial topics, materials ordinarily considered biased
by scientists, such as editorials, are also valuable for research, as they are in the real
world.
 On the average, students need to know how to write a good letter more than they
need to know the half-lives of uranium and lead isotopes, but a lesson that has a student
writing a letter to the editor of his hometown paper about the problem of nuclear waste
can teach both in context.
 Public speaking is an important skill in countries where most citizens have free
speech and important issues to address. Students need to be able to defend their
opinions in order to make good use of their rights.
 Given a particular problem, students should be able to decide which topics to
research in pursuit of a solution, because this is expected in all but menial jobs. The
ability to ask the right questions and then to independently research them is rarely
expected in undergraduates in introductory courses, but if this is the last science class
they are likely to take, make it count.

If the Lecture taught the lesson to the students by using role plays is very easy to
understand these lessons .the following is given below Role-playing exercises can be
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hard work for the instructor, both in preparation and in execution, but the work tends to
pay off in terms of student motivation and accomplishment. As with any big project, it's
best to take it one step at a time:

1. Define Objectives

2. Choose Context & Roles

3. Introducing the Exercise

4. Student Preparation/Research

5. The Role-Play

6. Concluding Discussion

7. Assessment

Fortunately, much of the work of preparation, once done, can be distributed to other
educators. Many well-developed role-playing exercises are available on the scenario
pages, organized by topic or by type.

Why we choose role play as my project?

The details of what you need to do depend entirely on why you want to include role-
playing exercises in your course.

 What topics do you want the exercise to cover?

 How much time do you and your class have to work on it?
 What do you expect of your students: research, reports, and presentations?
 Do you want the students role-playing separately or together?
 Do you want to include a challenge or conflict element?

Choose Context & Roles-

In order to prepare for the exercise:

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 Decide on a problem related to the chosen topic(s) of study and a setting for the
characters. It is a good idea to make the setting realistic, but not necessarily real.
Consider choosing and adapting material that other instructors have prepared.
 For problems and settings with lots of detail, have a look at examples in the Starting
Point Case Study Module. The module itself contains more information about using
cases to teach.
 If the characters(s) used in the exercise are people, define his or her goals and what
happens if the character does not achieve them.
 You should work out each character’s background information on the problem or,
better yet, directions on how to collect it through research. If possible, prepare maps and
data for your students to interpret as part of their background information rather than the
conclusions upon which they would ordinarily base their decisions (especially if the
characters are scientists).

Engage the students in the scenario by describing the setting and the problem-

 Provide them with the information you have already prepared about their character:
the goals and background information. It needs to be clear to the student how committed
a character is to his/her goals and why.
 Determine how many of your students have done role-playing before and explain how
it will work for this exercise.
 Outline your expectations of them as you would for any assignment and stress what
you expect them to learn in this lesson.
 If there is an inquiry element, suggest a general strategy for research/problem
solving.

Student Preparation/Research:

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Even if there is no advance research assigned, students will need a few moments to look
over their characters and get into their roles for the exercise. There may also be
additional questions:

Why they are doing this in character?

Why did you decide to make this a role-playing exercise?

 Students may have reservations about the character that they have been assigned or
about their motives. It is good for the instructor to find out about these before the actual
role-play. It can be very difficult for a student to begin researching an issue from a
perspective very different from their own because even apparently objective data tends
to be reinterpreted as support for pre-existing world-views.
 With regards to environmental issues, many environmental groups have well-written,
carefully researched, and nicely-engineered websites that will provide arguments as well
as information for a student assigned a character to whom protecting the environment is
very important.
 The Sierra Club Homepage (more info)
 World watches Institute Homepage (more info)
 Natural Resources Defense Council Homepage (more info)
 Similar websites representing the very common viewpoint of the worker, property
owner, or industrialist whose future may be in conflict with environmental interests are
hard to find. One site, Debate Central, has constructed arguments for characters
promoting property rights and wary of government intervention. Their topic coverage is
still limited, however. A poorer alternative is to send students to the websites of
companies involved in an issue to read their PR material.
 Often, the best resource for understanding people is other people. Model UN
encourages participants to call the embassy of the country they are to represent for
advice. The same can be done with the PR divisions of mining firms and unions,
environmental and taxpayer protection groups, etc.

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 If there is an inquiry component (i.e. student-led research), the students may need
help coming up with a research plan and finding resources.

The Role-Play:

Depending on the assignment, students could be writing papers or participating in

a Model-UN-style summit. For a presentation or interaction, props can liven up the event,
but are not worth a lot of effort as they are usually not important to the educational goals
of the project.

 Potential Challenges with Interactive Exercises

Concluding Discussion:

Like any inquiry-based exercise, role-playing needs to be followed by a debriefing for the
students to define what they have learned and to reinforce it. This can be handled in
reflective essays, or a concluding paragraph at the end of an individual written
assignment, or in a class discussion. The instructor can take this opportunity to ask the
students if they learned the lessons defined before the role-play began.

Assessment:

Generally, grades are given for written projects associated with the role-play, but
presentations and even involvement in interactive exercises can be graded. Special
considerations for grading in role-playing exercises include:

 Playing in-character
 Working to further the character's goals
 Making statements that reflect the character's perspective
 In an interactive exercise, being constructive and courteous
 For many assignments, being able to step back and look at the character's situation
and statements from the student's own perspective or from another character's
perspective.
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Potential Challenges with Interactive Exercises

Large Classes:

For large classes, split the group up, or use etiquette like Robert's Rules of Order
(more info) to ensure that people who have something to say can say it. A Model UN
works well for large groups.

Good vs. Evil:

The students need to sympathize with their characters, so it is a bad idea to

assign overtly evil ones. It's too much to ask of students to represent the interests of
genocidal tyrants. These exercises are supposed to be fun! Likewise, the instructor
should use situations without simple or obvious solutions or situations that are doomed.
Because of issues in the students' own backgrounds, it is also generally good to choose
settings and characters that are either fictitious or well removed from the students in
space and time. Asking college students to role-play well-known Republican or
Democratic politicians can be a recipe for trouble.

Not Letting Go:

One reason that open-ended, problem-solving exercises are fun and somewhat
realistic is that the students, in character, decide the outcome of the scenario. This can
be damaged if the instructor decides on the "correct" ending or pushes the students to
play characters a certain way.

Lack of Social Skills:

A chronic problem with role-playing is that some students don't pay attention to
others and that charismatic students can overwhelm less assertive ones. If the student is
violating the rules you as the instructor have established for the role-play, do not hesitate

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to remove them from the exercise immediately. Disciplinary action may be appropriate
depending on the student's behavior. However, within the limits of the rules, there will
still be minor problems, which may actually become a useful part of the lesson. Bonnet's
(2000) 10-year-old students reported that they were alienated by characters that came
across as too angry about issues. These children may well recognize that courtesy and
calmness are valuable tools for a debater.

Team Role Play:

Team role playing is an excellent exercise for…

 Analyzing problems from various perspectives

 Implementing brainstorming methodology in simulations of real cases
 Trying various solutions in a case scenario
 Developing team-work, co-operation and creative problem solving in groups
 Exercising creative techniques in a risk-free environment

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HOW IT WORKS

Role playing is when a group of people act out roles for a particular scenario. For
instance, you might train sales people by having two people act out a sale-scenario. One
acts as the sales person. The other acts as the customer. This allows trainee sales
people to practice their sales techniques. A trainer and/or other trainees may watch the
role play and critique it afterwards.

Team role-playing is similar, except that two or more teams actively participate.
For instance, a group of 10 people and one trainer are divided into two teams of five
each. One person in each group acts out the relevant role in the scenario. The other four
act as coaches providing advice to their actor. The trainer does not take part in either
group. Rather she oversees the exercise. To make team role playing more effective, a
secret conflict is introduced from the beginning. Only the trainer is aware of the conflict.
Upon completion of the role playing, the trainer leads a discussion on the role-play.

Example: a software company learns that customers are unhappy with customer support
and this is causing a loss of customers. In order to improve customer support, the
company decides to use team role playing. A trainer brings together a group of 12
software developers and customer support representatives.

The trainer introduces the problem and encourages an open discussion in order to
put all the relevant issues on the table and get participants thinking about the problem in
depth prior to the team role playing.

While discussion is still relatively lively, the trainer interrupts, divides the
participants into two groups. Participants should be randomly assigned to groups, such
as by having each person pulling a paper, indicating group membership, out of a hat. It is
important that the participants do not divide themselves into groups. Getting people who
do not normally work together to do so creates new synergies which should promote
greater creative thinking.

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Group A (playing the role of a customer support person) receives a card which states:

"This customer is very influential. To lose them would be highly damaging to the
company. You must do anything within reason to retain them"

Group B (playing the role of the customer) receives a card stating:

"You have seriously overspent your software budget and while you are not unhappy with
the product, you must convince the customer support person to take back the product
and refund your money. Since you cannot admit the actual situation (as it would clearly
not be legitimate for a refund), you must find problems with the software sufficient to
legitimize the return and refund."

The groups meet separately for five to ten minutes to discuss strategy and who
will be the actor. Then the two actors go to the centre of the room to perform the role
play. At any time during the role play, the actors can look to their teams for advice.
Likewise teams can offer unsolicited advice. Normally the teams are physically
separated from their actors. However, each team can call one "time out" to have a
private discussion of strategy.

In a lively role-play, a team member may very well offer advice to the actor of the
other team. There is nothing wrong with this and the trainer should not prohibit it,
although the teams themselves may do so.

Eventually, a solution of some sort will be found. If the conflict is not apparent to
both sides and there is still sufficient enthusiasm in the teams, the trainer may ask the
teams to find another solution.

Once it is clear no more solutions are to be found, the groups are brought
together and discuss the role play, their strategies, their solution, relevance to real world
situations, and alternative solutions.

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Optionally, each team can draft a short "lessons learned" paper about the role
play. The papers can be combined and copies distributed to all role play participants and
any other staff who might learn from the role play.

Effective use of role playing in learning and development

Role playing has been around as a learning tool for a long time. Without defining it
as such, many of us use role play as a basic tool of life. Whenever we project into the
future in a kind of 'what if' scenario we are indulging in a role play of some sort, we are
projecting ourselves into an imaginary situation where, though we cannot control the
outcome, we can anticipate some or all of the conditions and 'rehearse' our performance
in order to influence the outcome. Much of the time we are better for it. By way of
example, you might wish to speak to your garage to raise the fact that they have still not
cured the oil leak. Before doing so you might well rehearse to yourself what you intend to
say. This would be a mini role play - we do it all the time because it helps.

In a learning environment role play can be a very flexible and effective tool. The
tenet 'I hear and I forget I see and I remember, I do and I understand' is very applicable
here. Role play is often used as a way of making sense of the theory, of gathering
together concepts into a practical experience. And yet, it often goes wrong, why?
Because like so many things which are simple on concept, it can become awfully
complicated, if used badly in a training environment the role play tool can be ineffective
and sometimes even damaging. One of the main complicating factors surrounding role
play is the attitude or emotional state of the people taking part. Quite frankly, many
people are nervous, even terrified, at the prospect of participating in a role play; not
surprising when you hear about some people's unfortunate role play experiences.

For the purpose of this article, role play is defined as an experience around a
specific situation which contains two or more different viewpoints or perspectives. The
situation is usually written as a prepared brief and the different perspectives on the same
situation are handed out to the different people who will come together to discuss the

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situation. Each person will have a particular objective, or objectives they want to fulfill
which may well be in conflict with their fellow role player or role players. It is how each
role player handles the situation that forms the basis of skills practice, assessment and
development. The situations will be realistic and relevant to the role players and the most
successful ones will be focused on developing a particular skill or skill set. If you
consider a musical analogy, each 'player' is involved in the same 'symphony' but has a
different score - their perspective and objective(s) - for their own 'instrument' -
themselves as individuals - their histories.

So, how can we take the fear out of the role play experience?

Here are some guidelines that you might like to think about when planning your next
session……..

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ROLE PLAYS OBJECTIVES

 Be very clear about what you want people to get out of the role playing experience.
Muddy thinking at the outset will result in muddy outcomes. Clear thinking and role play
preparation result in clear outcomes.
 Are you assessing skills or are you developing them? If you are assessing people,
they need to know the competency level expected of them and the brief needs to have
measurable outcomes. People also need to trust that the role play will have the same
level of challenge for them and their peers. So, don't put people through an assessment
role play until you know they have reached a certain standard (through development
activities and role plays)?
 Are you giving everyone the same level of challenge, or are you flexing according to
the level of skill demonstrated by each individual? The former is more recommended for
assessment, the latter for development (see above).

Role playing placement - where in the agenda:

 In skills development programmer, trainers and facilitators often schedule a role play
exercise at the end of a course, to gather in the learning, and to assess how well the
participants have understood the training. Leaving it until last can cause 'the dreaded
role play' to loom large in people's minds, causing a negative distraction throughout the
course. So instead, introduce people to the role play experience gently by holding mini
role plays earlier and throughout the training. This serves a double purpose: it de-
mystifies the experience so that people become more comfortable with the idea of
'performing' in public; and, it more fairly shows role playing to be a very good tool for
rehearsing life, which is its main function.
 To illustrate the important value of role playing, here is a theatre analogy: actors
spend hours rehearsing a twenty minute scene. They do it again and again to get it right;
to get the behaviors’ and the relationships right, to make sense of the scene and to
understand the issues. They get feedback in the form of notes from the director, which
they will immediately apply to the work in hand. They carry on in this way until its perfect
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and the scene becomes part of them. This is not to suggest that people in learning and
development situations should become actors and rehearses their life scenarios for
hours on end, but the principle is the same.
 Be realistic in your ambitions for the role play. For instance, if you are teaching a
complex behavioral model, break it down, rather than have people role play it in one
huge chunk. Just as actors don't rehearse a play in one huge lump, they break it down
into (sometimes) tiny micro-units and rehearse until they really feel confident with each
bit, so the same principles apply to any complex new skill to be learned. Being over-
ambitious cause’s people to lose confidence on them and in role playing as a tool. Like
any tool, role playing must be used properly or it won't work. If you don't have time to
eventually get the participants doing the whole thing properly, in depth, with plenty of
rehearsal and revisiting, then just do a part of it.

Role play briefing

 Role playing can become ineffective if people are unclear about what they are
supposed to do. The briefs for all sides of the role play should be unambiguous and
totally in line with the objectives. Here again, any muddy thinking will have
consequences. Be clear about the purpose. If you are assessing skills in a certain
situation then the brief must reflect this. If you are assessing or developing behavior,
keep technicalities out of the brief. Generally, remove technical content except for the
very basic information needed to particularize the culture. Otherwise, lots of technical
detail provides a bolt hole for people who are skilled or pre-occupied in technicalities,
when they should be focusing on structure, or process or behavior. The exercise will
keep its point and value if it avoids technical distractions.
 Role playing briefs should contain enough information for both parties to engage in a
believable and relevant conversation, which should be in line with the objectives. Give as
much detail as is necessary - too little and there won't be enough to sustain a
conversation, too much and people will be swamped with information, most of which they
either won't need or won't remember.

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 Avoid giving people the task of role playing attitudes alone. If you want somebody to
role play an angry customer give them something to be angry about. Behavior, like
acting, is all about specifics. If you are angry with your garage about a specific oil leak
and their inability to cure it, there will have been a specific chain of events that has led to
your picking the phone up and complaining. It is not a general anger at everything. Role
players can forget this in the heat of the moment if given open license to just 'be angry';
there needs to be a reason for it. A well written brief will help to keep the role play
focused and on track.
 Adequate preparation time may seem obvious, but it is often overlooked in the belief
that it is best to get on with it. People can be encouraged to share what they are trying to
achieve with observers, so it becomes a shared, facilitative exercise rather than a battle -
this will also defuse fear and tension. Again, sharing objectives will help and not 'spoil'
the role play.
 In developmental role play, the option can be given to press the pause button where
people feel they are getting into difficulty. Although building up a flow in a role play has
advantages, it is not a scene from TV soap, it is a rehearsal tool. And in rehearsals,
people stop and start. No-one should be expected to give a 'performance'. Emphasizing
this too will dissipate people's fear and concern.

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