[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
To assume or act out a
roles before reading about the situation. Role playing is most
particular role
effective for predictions when two 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.

ADVANCED ENGLISH COMMUNICATIONS SKILLS

LAB
MINI PROJECT
 ROLE PLAY 2011

TITILE: ROLE PLAY

SUBMITTED BY
NAME:
RESEARCH SUPERVISOR: [Link]

NRI INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

(Affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Kakinada)
Visadala road, Perecharla 522009

Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh

Project guide Head of the

Department

External examiner

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

In
Bachelor of Technology

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 ROLE PLAY 2011

In
(Electronic Communication & Engineering)
By

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

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

Under the guidance of

Smt: TULASI,

NRI INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

(Affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Kakinada)
Visadala road, Perecharla 522009

Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh

CERTIFICATE

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 ROLE PLAY 2011

This is to certify that this dissertation entitled as ‘ROLE PLAY’ is the bonafide work of
1) [Link] 2) [Link] 3) [Link] and 4)
[Link],
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)___________________________________________
5)

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INDEX
TOPIC: - PAGE NO:
CHAPTER-1:
1.1. Introduction to role play 7
1.2. Objectives of role play 9

CHAPTER-2:
2.1. Types of role play 11
2.2. Role playing glossary 16
2.3. Uses of role play 18
2.4. How it works 25

CHAPTER-3:
3.1. Conclusion of role plays 33

3.2. Bibliography 34

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ROLE PLAY
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.

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

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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.

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?

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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 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.

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 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 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.

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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.

Typical individual role-play scenarios:

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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 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

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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.

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

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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-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.

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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.

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

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“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:

"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:

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 ).

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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 ).
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 ).

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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
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.

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 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 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:

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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.
 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:

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 "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.
 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.

1. Define Objectives

2. Choose Context & Roles

3. Introducing the Exercise

4. Student Preparation/Research

5. The Role-Play

6. Concluding Discussion

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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.

Choose Context & Roles-

In order to prepare for the exercise:

 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.

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Student Preparation/Research:

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.
 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.

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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.

Potential Challenges with Interactive Exercises

Large Classes:

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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 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:

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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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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 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. .

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CONCLUSION:

 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.
 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.

BIBLOGRAPHY:
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 [Link]

 [Link]

 [Link]

Discussions: Advanced Role Play for English as a

Foreign Language by - FRANK HEYWORTH

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