ROLE PLAY

                  This activity is particularly good when you want students to understand the emotional content of some incident or literary passage.  It works very well in social studies, English and drama or wherever you wish to employ a short cut to the affective domain of student understanding.

PREPARATION FOR ACTIVITY

·       Ideally, each situation should give students insight into the lesson you wish them to learn. Make prompts for participating students, using no more than three students for a situation.  Create the  situations  brief discussion of the circumstances and the roles involved in each scene.  Include only enough information for the students to work out their improvisation.

·       Tell students the standards you have developed for grading the presentation (perhaps an individual grade for performance and a group grade for presentation?)

·       Warn students that absence of a participant will mean the performing group forfeits its turn and its grade unless there is some over-riding reason to give them a chance to present later.

ACTIVITY

·       Divide the students into casts for the skits.

·       Have one person from each cast draw a prompt sheet (enough copies for cast clipped together.) from the stack you have previously created.

·       Give each group a few minutes to plan the presentation. This is likely to take the full period or more, depending on the size of the class.

·       Utilize a separate day for discussion of the projects and the lesson about the text that you had wanted them to gain insight about.