The Classes They Remember

Using Role-Plays to Bring Social Studies and English to Life

David Sherrin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138938687
• eBook ISBN: 9781317382546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learn how to use role-plays to bring history and literature to life! When students take on the roles of historical or literary figures, they develop a greater understanding of characters' identities and motivations, and are able to more deeply explore and reflect upon key issues and themes. In this new book from award-winning teacher David Sherrin, you'll find out how this lively instructional format will make teaching a more immersive, interactive, and memorable experience for your middle school and high school students. The book includes:

• A clear how-to guide to get the most out of role-playing in your class;
• Ready-made units and lessons to get you started right away, complete with sample scripts, scaffolding worksheets, and assessment rubrics;
• Templates and step-by-step instructions to help you design your own role-plays.

The pre-made units, which Sherrin spent years refining in his classroom, cover historical topics such as the rise of Nazi Germany and the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. You'll also find fun and interactive role-plays based on literary works like The Pearl and Fences. These lessons will help students at all ability levels to become better communicators, problem-solvers, and creative thinkers.

PART

1

How To Role-Play: A Guide

CHAPTER 1

Common Questions about Role-Playing

I think role-playing really helps you understand why people made the decisions they made. It puts you in the shoes of important people in history and gives you a deeper understanding of complicated eras in history.

(Carlos, 10th grader)

How Do I Keep the Whole Class Engaged and Learning in a Role-Play?

Not every student can act in the role-play at each moment. To keep observers focused on the action and dialogue, and learning from the scenes, I created observer worksheets. Students take an observational role, such as artist, life coach, photographer, or therapist. They watch the role-play using that lens and fill out the corresponding sheet. These sheets actually bring observers indirectly into the action; during pauses we hear from them as they provide insight and advice for the actors. You can find one template on p. 46 and others online.

How Should I Structure the Class and the Classroom?

I utilize three different role-playing structures depending on the needs of a particular scene.

Option 1: The Full-Class Role-Play

The full-class approach works well when every character can be involved, especially during a battle scene. This means orchestrating the action of 20–30 kids shooting arrows, exchanging gifts, or enjoying a banquet. The benefit is that so many students are directly experiencing the action. The drawback can be the logistics of engaging this many students at one time.

Option 2: The Fishbowl Version

In the fishbowl, about 2–10 students role-play in the center of the room and the other students are in a circle around them, actively observing the action and filling out the previously mentioned observer sheets or a rubric for a particular character. During pauses the observers provide advice and do most of the follow-up debrief and reflection.

Option 3: The Small Group Role-Plays

The small-group format works particularly well for English literature role-plays and for historical scenes in which there is a very limited cast of characters. In this structure, you break the class into groups of about 4–5 students. One of them becomes the “master” who gets the script and directs the action. The others take on a character or an observer role. You have 2–5 different groups role-playing the same scene and choice moment at once and you can rotate to observe. Afterwards, as a class you come back to debrief the various ways this played out. In historical scenes, it is particularly interesting when you have many characters making the same type of decision. For example, you can have multiple groups of Jewish families trying to explain to their children what is happening around them.

Can Students Lead Role-Plays?

Yes! Just as in almost any area of teaching, student-led activities add layers of richness to the experience. I particularly enjoy student-led role-plays for literature because the book provides most of the context (instead of the Role-Play Master) so the work is a bit easier. This functions best assuming a few factors: (1) the class has role-played before; (2) we set out the context, conflict, and choices as a larger group; (3) we have a lesson template, observer sheets, and rubrics ready-to-use. The Role-Play Masters must choose moments to pause for reflection and advice, and some suggested questions are available on the template. Once the role-playing process is clear and the context, conflict, and choices of a particular scene are evident, students may also enjoy directing the action. While doing a literature role-play of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, one of my students, DJ, took charge by casting the characters, directing the action, leading a debrief, and redoing scenes when needed. At the end, he kicked up his feet and declared, “I need a latte!”

Figure 1.1 A Student-Led Scene in Small-Group Format

What Do I Do if the Students Want to Change the Story?

Students at times want to do something that is not on the script, but is clearly historically accurate and plausible. For example, I have a scene in which Nazi officers command three teachers to expel their Jewish students. In my script, I assume that the teachers agree to do so under that compulsion and the next scene involves them telling the students. I can’t imagine, though, every possible response to the choice. This is, to me, perhaps the most fascinating part of role-play. I can do it every year with students and each time it is legitimately different (if I am doing it right and am opening agency for the students). The students surprise me. While my role-play scripts are highly detailed, I have to be willing to deviate from it and to venture into the unknown along with my students.

This year, in one class a Jewish teacher refused the order and quit her job while the German teacher reluctantly acquiesced. My script called for both the teachers to address the class, but based on their prior decisions only the German teacher did so. In my other class, the two teachers agreed to expel the students, but then conspired to teach them in secret. I allowed them to create a brief plan, they rolled dice for success or failure (they both rolled high and were successful) and then, on the fly, the next scene involved them expelling the students and then revealing their plan to them in secret.

How Accurate Does the Scene Need to Be?

The question of accuracy is important for both historical and literature role-plays. You want to keep everything you provide true to the accepted historical story, especially regarding the places, people, and events that have entered the canon. But then you need to decide where there is wiggle-room for student choice. Let’s use an example of a battle between the Spanish and the Aztecs. All the characters are real historical people, some of whom survived the battle and some who did not. For our purposes, it does not matter who survives other than Hernán Cortés and Bernal Diaz del Castillo. It is important that Montezuma not be killed early on and that eventually the Spanish kidnap him. I’m not concerned how they kidnap him and some variation provides interest when we compare their strategy to what is described in the text.

But what do we do if students want to do something totally off the radar and possibly ahistorical? My response has changed over the years. If students asked me to do something far off script during my first attempts at role-plays, I mostly shrugged them off since I didn’t have a scene ready and I didn’t know whether it had actually happened. Perhaps a student wanted to assassinate Hitler in the Germany role-play or tried to stage a coup against Cortés in the Aztec one.

I’ve started to realize that my students’ instincts in taking on these choices are often right on target with what actually happened and they lead me to learn something new. Usually, I just need to do more research to discover that these choices did take place. There were Germans, including Jews, who did hatch plots to kill Hitler Members of Cortés’ crew did try to overthrow him. So now, if a student brings up that option, I may tell him or her to hold off a couple of lessons but I will include that as an option after some research. And when that chance comes, I do frame it within one of the actual attempts to rid Germany of Hitler.

What Do I Do if a Key Student Isn’t There to Play Her Role?

There are days when an incredibly well-planned scene will need last-minute reshuffling because a student with a key role is absent or no student ever chose that character in the first place.

This is an example of where you just need to be light on your feet in managing the scene. Think of the big picture of what you want to get out of that scene and move some pieces around to get there. For example, my Germany role-play involves a book-burning scene in which two Jews, Simon and Rachel, stumble across a group of Germans throwing books authored by Jews into the pile. Simon is a history professor and in the lesson’s background I state that Rachel’s brother also wrote some of the books. I want to get at both the personal and communal nature of this conflict they find themselves in.

This year, no student had chosen to play Simon and, unfortunately, Rachel was absent. This is a typical dilemma, especially when you have the fortune of a small class (interestingly, a really small class can be a boon in every sense except, sometimes, in role-play). I needed to replace them with other similar characters. For Rachel, pretty much any Jewish female could function. To replace Simon, it made sense to put in Joshua, the rabbi, as he could easily have written a book about Judaism that was also in the pile. The shift in characters took about 30–60 seconds to work out and we were ready-to-go.

What Do We Do if We Don’t Finish the Role-Play?

A sense of pacing helps role-plays function, but it only really comes from experience. There are certainly times when I do not finish the established “lesson” in one of my role-plays whether because a scene was too compelling to st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Companion Website
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Playing with Our Minds
• Part 1 How To Role-Play: A Guide
• Chapter 1 Common Questions about Role-Playing
• Chapter 2 Creating Role-Plays
• Chapter 3 Executing Role-Plays
• Part 2 Examples of Historical Role-Plays
• Chapter 4 The Aztec-Spanish Encounter
• Chapter 5 Weimar and Nazi Germany
• Part 3 Examples of Literature Role-Plays
• Chapter 6 Fences, The Pearl, and More
• Conclusion