I’m going to make a confession:

I’m not particularly good at role play.

I was never very good at taking part in them, and experience of trying to use them in the classroom has usually left me slightly disappointed.

There have been two exceptions to this.  The mock trial of Charles I with the summer residential students at Edge Hill was a resounding success, if a counterfactual resounding success.  And the first time I tried my early modern ‘world turned upside down’ role plays with the graveyard shift on the Friday afternoon at Hope, they worked really well.  But they never have since.  They’ve always gone okay, but they’ve never quite managed to produce the results I hope for since that first time.

I even asked the Twitter hive mind for advice, to no avail – absolutely no-one responded! So I took the opportunity, while I was at Edge Hill over the summer, to pick up some books on teaching through role play.  If you teach in a college with a high number of education students, you might as well take advantage of the pedagogical advice that’s available…

One of the books I picked up was ‘The Classes They Remember’ by David Sherrin.  Although it is aimed at teachers working with high school students, I am a high-school-trained teacher myself, and I still think that teaching is teaching – you just adapt it to suit your students.  It’s a fascinating read, and frankly, it turns out that there’s a lot more to role playing than I’d ever realised.  Sherrin advocates using role play as the basis for entire courses, and although I don’t think I’d ever go that far, there is actually a US-based version for university history courses: Reacting to the Past.  At any rate, I’d never really associated ‘role play’ with the old (?) Dungeons and Dragons style immersive role play, which is where Sherrin was coming from.  What I really liked, though, was the way that the sessions were based on page-long extracts from primary sources and academic secondary sources, not the individual paragraphs taken out of context in the English school text books and revision guides that I’ve seen lately.

In Sherrin’s scheme, the teacher is the ‘game master’, and there to prevent anything historically inaccurate occurring.  He breaks the scheme down into steps:

• Create characters – Significant individuals in the story or archetypal ordinary people. Provide background information about each on.
• Determine the scenes – Decide on 1-3 scenes for each lesson in which the characters make key decisions or actions, including enough scenes to tell a fleshed-out version of the story.
• Write the background narrative (context for the scene). When is this taking place? Where is it taking place? What details explain the events that are about to happen? What typical emotions and thoughts of the population at the time? What happened between the previous scene and this one?  You need to check they have understood this before you start the role play.
• Choice moments –include at least 3 key decisions that will drive subsequent acting in each role play. These decisions derive from conflict ( eg negotiation, strategic planning, intrafamilial conflict, ethical dilemmas, individual physical or verbal conflict, battles) and are given as simple questions. The outcomes are up to the students but you can question them to point them in a particular direction.
• Action and Speaking Cards – to strike the balance between giving freedom of choice to the students and guiding them towards the specific conflicts and actions that actually happened. They are used to provoke choice moments and should use the actual language from a primary source if at all possible.
• Gather props (optional). Real food for banquets (even if it’s indicative rather than accurate), pictures of animals, items to be bargained for, robes, crowns, plastic swords…
• Pivotal Decision Debates – where a large number of characters in a community assemble to debate a question which will have a significant impact on all their futures. For a full scale unit, there should be 2 or 3 of these.

Like I said, I don’t think I’d ever go the whole way and teach a whole course through role play, but I can see that this is far more involved than what I’ve been doing up to now.  I think that there is probably a happy medium somewhere between what I’ve been doing and Sherrin’s immersive technique – a pared back version, perhaps – and I’m going to revisit the role plays in my teaching for Liverpool Hope to see if I can develop them into something more substantial and meaningful, to see if that improves the outcomes.

I’m going to keep looking into it, and consider other ways I can incorporate different sorts of role play in my teaching, too.