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
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