Acting/Role Play
Overview
Physically acting out a text enhances reading comprehension. As learners make decisions about what to include as part of a dramatization, they must comprehend, recall, and carefully reflect on how to represent the characters and events from the text.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Watch as these groups of students create tableaus for various fairy tales. The steps of reading, planning, and acting can help shift the story and meaning from Short-term Memory to Long-term Memory. The audience can also participate by guessing which fairy tale is being acted out.
Design It into Your Product
Videos are chosen as examples of strategies in action. These choices are not endorsements of the products or evidence of use of research to develop the feature.
Learn how Mindshow, a virtual reality program, provides a way to create and share animated movies. The program supplies various characters, backgrounds, and props to choose from before players use their own physical movements and facial expressions to animate the scene.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Active Learning Strategies
Expressing ideas through visuals and audio, and understanding others' ideas in these forms, is as critical in today's world as traditional reading and writing.
Students activate more cognitive processes by exploring and representing their understandings in visual form.
When students explain their thinking process aloud, they recognize the strategies they use and solidify their understanding.
Visiting places connected to classroom learning provides opportunities to deepen understanding through firsthand experiences.
Games help students visualize how to connect one fact to another.
Playful activities can support the development of learners' Metacognition and also inspire their narratives and writing.
Project-based learning (PBL) actively engages learners in authentic tasks designed to create products that answer a given question or solve a problem.
Response devices boost engagement by encouraging all students to answer every question.
