Role Playing

On Monday night our class used role playing to learn about No Child Left Behind. During the class period many students became very emotionally involved. Looking back I think this was an interesting way of learning and can be beneficial in many ways. Not only did we (the students) learn about the legislation but we also learned about accountability and that there is more to education then just learning the facts. The students had to be accountable for learning about their role ahead of time otherwise the exercise would not have worked. Role playing also got our emotions involved in the lesson and made me look at the opposing view (which I had to pretend was my own). If a lecture would have been used, many issues would not have been brought up such as who society actually listens to (the high achieving vs. low achieving; tax payers/business owners vs. teachers). We learned how unfair "open forums" can be if the people running it are only looking for opinions that agree with their views. Since we became emotionally involved we took more away from it and even engaged in discussions outside of class. If this would have been lectured on we might have learned more facts, but we probably would not remember many of them. I think role playing would be useful in the classroom because it would give students a new way to learn. It probably would not work every day for every topic, but when used in the right circumstance it is a good teaching style that provides more than facts and numbers. I like how it gets the students involved and they are encouraged to look at things in a new way.