Role play/ simulation

Role play is an effective strategy for facilitating active learning in your class. It provides opportunities for students to explore real-world complex, multidimensional concepts in a safe environment.

The role-play activity consists of two parts:

  1. The simulation (the scene and context in which role-playing will be undertaken)
  2. The role-playing (the characters your students will be performing within the simulation).
Role play is

effective for:

best to pair with:

  • Authentic experience
  • Peer learning
  • Collaboration and cooperation
  • Develop students transferable skills (negotiation, teamwork, debate, problem solving)
  • Reflective thinking or practice
  • Case study
  • Large discussion groups
  • Limited resource problem solving
  • Think-pair-share

To prepare a role-play scenario:

Identify the situation you want the role play to address. Make sure it aligns with relevant learning outcomes.

Add the details of your scenario. Make sure you provide enough detail to make it feel like a real-world situation and provide clear instructions to your students on:

  • what the purpose/goal of the role play is
  • the problem or issue you’re hoping to address
  • how it aligns to the relevant learning outcomes.

Reduce content. Reduce large chunks of content into smaller sections so your role-plays will be more effective.

Assign roles to your students. Once the scenario has been set, you need to assign the different roles to your students. Make sure you provide enough information to each student on the role they are playing and their character's context in the scenario to ensure active engagement. This may include information such as:

  • Their characters name and position (e.g. manager, teacher, sales person, customer)
  • What their character's role is in the scenario (e.g. are they angry, happy, confused? Do they have a major role in the scenario, or are they playing a supportive role?)
  • Provide some background information to each student on their characters perspectives, goals, motivations and feelings within the scenario
  • Provide each student with guidelines on their characters general behaviour during the role-play (eye contact, gestures, voice tone) and stipulate guidelines around what language is inappropriate during the role-play
  • Provide any props or outline what props can be used.
  • As you read, watch out for specialist vocabulary - make a note of such vocabulary and find out what it means.

Allow time for clarifying questions and practice. To ensure your students think deep about their role and provide meaningful engagement, be sure to ask of they have any clarifying questions and give them time to practice before they present the role-play scenario.

Challenge all students equally. Try and make each character relevant and equally challenging within your role-play so that each student is learning something from the experience.

Act out the scenario. It can be useful to repeat the scenario several times and increase the intensity of the situation by slightly changing how certain roles reacted. You can then discuss with your students the various ways they may handle the situation as the intensity increases.

Debrief and reflect on the role-play scenario. Once the activity is complete, be sure to open up the class to discussion on what they learnt. Link the discussion back to initial learning outcomes.

Example 1: In-class simple synchronous role-play (short term)

Counselling Role-play - Students role-play being a family therapist in a simulated clinical practice conducting a session with a client who reveals they have committed a criminal act.

Example 2: Online complex asynchronous role-play (long term)

The following role-play scenario is an example developed by R.G. McLaughlan and D. Kirkpatrick for university engineering students. The role-play was designed to provide students with a realistic awareness of the political, social, economic and scientific consequences of their decision making around international resource development. As this role-play was asynchronous, communication and collaboration was done via email (other online platforms such as Moodle Forums, Slack or Discord could also be used).

Students are placed into groups, each group represents a different persona. Together the group must decide on their online personas actions in the role-play as the scenario develops. The learning objective of the role play is for students to “develop an understanding of the multiple perspectives associated with issues related to regional and economic development and technology application within the Mekong region of South East Asia.”

The facilitator establishes the initial scenario and situation and then each group is instructed to research, discuss and enact how their persona will respond to the various political, social, economic and scientific issues that arise. Each group's persona is a different stakeholder in the scenario.

Over several weeks, the facilitator introduces new variables such as breaking social news, government agencies policy changes, funding issues, and other stakeholder concerns from non-government agencies, business corporations, media and people’s organisations based on real-world events or entities. Each persona is required to document how they will respond to each new variable added.

A combination of online self-assessment, peer review, reflection and ‘debrief’ essay is used at the completion of the role-play to determine what was learnt in relation to the initial learning objectives.