Using role play to teach complex ideas

Over the last year there has been a lot of talk about the use of play in teaching.  Many teachers may consider that this should be abandoned after primary school.  Over time I’ve come to ask myself, why?  Why should techniques that work within a primary school setting be set aside once we begin to focus on student success using ever more academic pedagogy.  Students enjoy playing, even when they claim not to, so why not continue to make the most of this.  One of the key lessons that I have learnt over the years is that if you can get students to understand content without them realising that they are covering it you’ve almost won the battle.  One method that I like to use to do this is using role play within lessons.

My definition or why I like to think of role play is “role playing is a learning structure that allows students to immediately apply content as they are put in the role of that content within a certain context within the lesson.”  This basically boils down to giving students roles within a curtain context, then allow them to use those roles to explain an often-complex concept.  In working through the role play activity, you have planned, you will also allow students who find written content difficult to access to still make progress.  There are a few key things that you need to consider before planning to use any role play activity within a lesson.

Be sure you know exactly what you want students to get out of the role play activity.  It’s worth looking at you lesson outcomes when planning your activity as believe me, it’s very easy to get carried away and go off at a tangent.  Stay focused on what students need to get out of the activity as if they can’t see the point in working through it, it will have an adverse effect on the BFL in the lesson.

Plan it well in advance and ensure that you have factored it into your lesson planning.  I discovered much to my horror when I first started using role play, that it can take longer than you think.  The way around is to make sure you factor plenty of time to carry the activity out in your lesson planning.  Don’t try and rush it however, as it will then loose its effectiveness.

Make sure that all students know what they are doing and the role that they need to play.  This is another lesson that after things going wrong more than once I have learnt.  One of the most important things to put in place at the start of any role play activity, is to make sure that every student has a role and that they understand that role. If students either have nothing to do or don’t understand what they need to do, they will become easily distracted which will have an adverse effect on their BFL.  There are a couple of easy ways to do this.  You can either give each student a role card with some brief instructions about what they need to do on it, or as you become more experienced, gather students around you and tell them their role quickly, get the set up then fill in more detail about their role after.

Be mindful about students going off task.  Although most students get a lot out of role play activities, there will still be some students who will use the freedom that they have been given to go off task.  The most important thing you need when combating this s to know your class.  The way that I work around this potential problem is to (A) make sure those students are the first ones to be given roles and (B) keep going back to those students and asking questions about their role to refocus them.

Get involved in the role play.  One key thing I like to do when getting students to carry out role play activities is to get involved with it.  If you are involved in the centre of the activity it will allow you to have excellent control of the activity and student’s behaviour while they are working through it, and your students will appreciate the fact that you are interacting with them. 

Once you’ve got these basics in play you’re ready to go.  Below I’ve outlined some of the activities that I have used.  I’m afraid that they’re all science based but there’s lots of opportunity to use role play in most other subjects.

States of matter:  This is a good one to use with year 7 students.  Start off by telling students that they are molecules.  You can then talk about the fact that molecules or atoms have energy that makes them vibrate, so get the students to vibrate.  Ask them “if I heated you up do you think you would vibrate more or less?”  Following this talk about states of matter and get students to arrange themselves into a solid.  Tell them you’re going to heat them up and see what they do.  Hopefully you’ll then be able to move them onto thinking that they will become a liquid and then a gas.

Digestion:  Out of all the role play activities I use this one is my favourite.  The basic premise of this activity is that you are going to get different groups of students representing different parts of the digestive system.  One giving either different students or different groups of students a part, explain to them what that part does and keep coming back and ask them what it does to help keep them on task.  The way that I arrange students is as follows.  Two students represent the mouth and teeth.  One student represents the salivary gland.  Six students standing in two rows facing each other so they can demonstrate peristalsis, represent the oesophagus.  Six students stand in a circle and represent the stomach.  On student represents the gal bladder and another represents the pancreas.  Usually as I’m running out of students by now, four students represent the small intestines and two represent the large intestines.  Finally, one student needs to represent the rectum.  After you have arranged your students into a complete digestive system, you can represent the food and move through them, asking questions on what is happening at each stage.

How leaves are adapted to carry out photosynthesis:  This activity works best if it is carried out in the lesson after you have focused on making sure that students know the equation for photosynthesis, as everything in the leaf needs to be related back to this equation.  Start off by giving each student a type of cell to be.  After you have done this arrange them into the structure of the cells I a leaf getting them to explain how each part and layer helps with photosynthesis.

Gas exchange in the lungs:  This one takes a bit of setting up as you need to arrange the tales in your room so they represent blood vessels, the heart, the body & the lungs.  Most of the students will represent blood cells, some need to represent the lungs and take pieces of paper representing carbon dioxide and give them pieces of paper representing oxygen.  Some other students need to represent body cells which take the oxygen from the blood cells and give them carbon dioxide.  Once students are moving around you can ask a range of questions on how the system is adapted.

As with most pedagogical techniques give it a go and hopefully you will be happily surprised by the results

Thanks for reading

Chalky

How to Engage Students With Revision Using the Labyrinth of Revision

Have you ever sat watching a film and thought to yourself 'I wish I could use this to teach a lesson', well the short answer is, with a bit of imagination & innovation you can.  I started planning a few epic lessons around films about a year ago, mainly for my own entertainment at first, and have been amazed how much students have enjoyed them.  It's a well-researched fact that if students are enjoying the lesson they will engage with it, and if students engage with the content of the lesson they will make a greater level of progress. 

One of my favourite films of all time is Labyrinth.  For years I've wanted the opportunity to have a go at building a labyrinth and use it in a lesson.  During the revision period last year, I finally got the chance.  We all have been there, doing revision before the exams and dying a little bit more inside with every exam question we go through.  So the challenge is 'how can we get students working through these questions without concisely knowing that they are working through exam questions'.  The solution I came up with was to, as a class, get them working their way around a labyrinth, having to answer questions and work through tasks on their way to the middle.  Every time they passed over a coloured square they have to answer a question on one aspect, when they reached a character out of the film, they had to go and compete a task and (for my own amusement) I sent out goblins from the castle in the middle that if students ran into them they had to answer a 6 mark exam question.  Some of the key things to think about when panning a lesson like this are:

• Start planning early.  A lesson based around your favourite movie is a lot of fun to teach but they need to be well planned to ensure that you squeeze in the content that you need to cover.
• Ditch the power point.  Whilst power point is a useful tool which is useful to fall back on, students have become desensitised to them because they probably see one in most lessons.  I'd suggest just having one or two slides to set the scene but then try something different.
• Get students up out of their seats.  I hate sitting down in a lesson, to the point where I've used a computer remote for years so I can wander around the room as I teach.  In that case there's a good chance that students also get bored with sitting down in lessons, so get them up moving around. 
• Build in lots of different activities.  By building in lots of small activities it ensures that the pace of your lesson is fast as students will be encouraged to move from one activity to another especially if you set it up as a bit of a competition.  It also ticks your box for differentiation as a well panned series of tasks should enable all students to find something they can work through.
• Have something massive that you use to teach with in the middle of the room.  By having something that students see as soon as they walk into the room it sets the tone for the lesson and helps enthuse them from the word go.  
• Keep an eye on the time.  I say this from experience, there is a good chance that you will get as carried away as your students.  Make sure you know how long you have left and periodically stop students to check their progress.
• HAVE FUN!  Students will be as enthused as you are especially when they see that you are having fun with the lesson.

Here are a few pictures showing what I did

Thanks for reading

Chalky

Getting students building models to improve progress in lessons

What do primary schools do better than secondary schools do?  This is one of many questions that over the years I have asked myself.  Students in primary schools seem to have much more motivation than some students in secondary schools, and I hope that it’s not just down to teenage hormones.  One of the reasons that I have come to believe is that I primary school students are still given time to ‘play’ and be creative in most aspects of the curriculum, not just in Art.

Students who are given the opportunity to be creative in lessons, will often better engage with the content.  Allowing students to be creative was something I tried to do when I first started teaching, but for whatever reason, used less and less as time went on.  This might have been down to having too much to teach and not enough curriculum time, or maybe a fear of allowing students too much freedom within a lesson.  So over the last few years this has been something I have tried to rectify.

When getting students to build models to explore concepts you still need to start with the content, however, you don’t necessarily need to stand at the front of the class and physically teach it.  The first step in allowing students to construct models is to allow them to collect or put together the information they need to help them build the model themselves.  This can be done in a few ways; you can use flipped learning and set students a series of youtube videos to watch & make notes on to help them, or lay out a range of information and allow students to gather what they need in small groups.  In some cases, you can give students a sheet with the content on and allow them to highlight what they think is relevant. 

Once students have the information they need, don’t assume they will automatically know where to start.  In many lessons where students are given a chance to build models to explore concepts there isn’t just one correct answer, however, there will still be a range of criteria that students need to incorporate into their models.  Before students start building their models don’t forget to give them a rough frame work to help them structure their ideas that they will incorporate.  In some cases, when you are giving students a task to complete where there is lots of scope for interpretation, it is worth showing students examples to help them get going.

Here are a few examples of some of the activities that I have let students work through over the last year. 

If you look online there is a wealth of examples of how models can be used in other lessons, not just Science.  Remember ‘Pastercine is your friend’.  I hope that this inspires you to give building models a go. 

Thanks for reading

Chalky