Role Play & Role Reversal: Steps and Suggestions
Role play and role play Reversals
- Have the students role-play the events leading to and causing a conflict.
- Freeze the role-play at the point the conflict begins, switch roles, and continue.
- Stop when you think the players might understand the other's point of view.
Discuss the issues.
- Ask Student A to present Student B's wants, feelings, and reasoning.
- Ask Student B whether Student A was accurate.
- Ask Student B to present Student A's wants, feelings, and reasoning.
- Ask Student A whether Student B was accurate.
Change chairs or hats.
Sample Role Play Steps
- Step 1: Warm up – Present a problem, providing examples, and have students predict what might happen.
- Step 2: Select participants – Identify and describe the characters and their characteristics. Ask for student volunteers or assign roles. Careful assigning a role that might put a student in an uncomfortable situation or reinforce a stereotype.
- Step 3: Set the stage – Establish and describe a plot (sequence of action), setting and review the impact they might have on the roles.
- Step 4: Prepare the observers – Focus on how the whole group can stay involved. May assign the audience specific tasks. For example, analyze and evaluate the realism of the role playing, respond to the effectiveness of different behaviors and actions the role players’ took, the consequences, the different ways of thinking the characters might have used, and the feelings of the different characters being portrayed.
- Step 5: Enact – The players assume the roles and spontaneously “role play” the situation from beginning to end.
- Step 6: Discuss and Evaluate – Review the action of the role playing, discuss the focus, and suggest ideas for another enactment. Ask about actions, consequences, and feelings of different characters.
- Step 7: Reenact – New interpretations of roles are shared and new possibilities for causes and effects are explored in this step.
- Step 8: Discuss and Evaluate repeat Step 6.
- Step 9: Share and Generalize – The problem situation role played is related to children’s current problems and the real experience in a non-threatening way.
See sample plan with script - preschool classroom management issue ...