Things to be kept in mind while designing role plays for training programs

Role play refers to changing of one's behavior to assume a particular role. Trainers conduct role plays to give practical demonstration of what has been studied by the audience. The audience size may vary from 30, 60 to 100 or more. Form groups according to names of colors, seasons, months in a year or days in a week. Once done ask the members to sit in their respective groups. If a group contains 10 participants the trainer should be able to provide topics where whole group can participate.

Following things should be kept in mind before preparing topics for role play -

1. How many members will be present.

2. What is the educational background of participants.

3. What is the mindset of the audience.

4. What is the Age of the members present.

Once the above analysis has been done, role plays can be designed accordingly. For example – The topic is Human Relation. If we are preparing role play for an audience containing 70 people, and plan to have 7 members in each group. Then we are planning to make 10 groups and have 7 members in each group. We have to decide the time frame lets say 3 mins each and feedback time of 1 min for every group. That comes to approximately 40 mins spend for role play. If Its 2 hrs session and we want to explain the practical approach to what has been taught we can conduct role plays peacefully and its really enjoyable.

After we have discussed on human relations for almost one hour and covered topics such as personal relations, parent - child relation, vendor – customer relation, employer – employee relation then we can enact role plays to understand the topic better. A trainer should prepare topics for role play keeping in mind the size of the group. Every member should be assigned a role and no body should be left. If its the first time the audience is doing role plays then you have to tell them what is role play and how they should conduct role plays or the whole thing will get messy and there will be no desirable out come.

Once the audience is clear then we can start distributing the topics. We have to explain them their topic and also help them in designing their role play if needed. For example - a role play on vendor customer relationship. The group should be clear that a person has to become a vendor and other has to become a customer and the rest 5 of 7 member group can either become customer, helper or distributor. We need to explain them. Be very specific when making your point or the message will be unclear.

Allot all groups 10 mins time to think and plan their role. After the completion of time we can start with role plays one by one. Ask ever group to judge the group performing role play in the front. This will capture their attention and keep them silent. This will help them in assessing how good or bad they were, and at the end we can provide our feed back on the performance of the best group. We have to keep in mind that we learn from each other and when we are clear of the gaps in our knowledge then only we try to fill them.

Thus a role play designed for a program is very exciting. We just have to be clear and conduct them properly for maximum return.