Working Together: Role-Play

Work together with your classmates to generate and refine ideas for your writing project. Choose one of the categories of role-playing activities — staging a debate, conducting an inquiry, or giving testimony — and assign roles to the members of your group. Then do the following:

  1. Appoint a member of your group — ideally, someone who is not involved in the role-playing activity — to record the ideas.
  2. Create a framework for the role-playing. Decide who will speak first, how long that person will speak, and what sort of responses are appropriate.
  3. As you conduct the role-playing, be polite (within bounds, of course — some political commentators are far from polite to their opponents).
  4. If you are responding to a writer’s ideas, ask for evidence to support his or her arguments or explanations.
  5. If you are adopting a role that requires you to disagree, don’t overdo it. Be willing to accept a reasonable explanation or argument.

Once you’ve completed the activity, review the notes taken by your recorder, and assess what you’ve learned.