For the past 15 years, I’ve had the pleasure as working as both an actor and a program designer and director in professional education via role playing.
I’ve worked primarily in legal and medical education, but have also worked in other areas, such as law enforcement and ethics.
I believe that role play based education can provide valuable skills enhancement for professions that depend on excellent communication skills. It’s easy to list communication skills in PowerPoint, but communications instruction cannot be absorbed or evaluated unless the communicator can be challenged in realistic circumstances by a skilled actor-educator.
Below is a link to a video overview of how role play and simulation are used at Albany Medical Center. I appear briefly from time to time as a surgeon, which is funny because I can barely tune up my bicycle.
While you wouldn’t want to hire me if you needed brain surgery, I can be of use as a program designer or actor. I can also help create role-play instruction materials on paper and video.
So while role play education is not brain surgery, it is a complex and evolving field that can provide huge benefits to any profession that requires people to talk to others, either one-on-one or in groups.
The pleasure for me is not just bringing what I know to people in other fields, it’s having the chance to learn about the challenges faced by my collaborators.
