Role Play Exercises

I believe role playing activities can be affective in classrooms for students of the appropriate age level. It does help the students become emotionally and more intellectually engaged in the material they are working with. However, the situations need to be carefully planned out so that they are successful. In our recent role play, the groups needed to be smaller or there needed to be a larger time allotted so that they discussion got to a deeper level and more people could have participated.
I do believe that students retain information longer when they emotionally invested in the material. However, a teacher needs to realize that the students can't be invested in everything because they would never be able to cover all the topics required in the allotted time.
I do believe it is important for students to be knowledgeable about the factual parts of the material (which could be presented in a lecture prior to the role play). I believe that to truly debate a topic well, you need to have the facts to support your arguement. I do believe that lecture is helpful because all the necessary points are covered and explained, whereas in a role play, things can be misinterpreted based on the specific situations that they students are acting out.
I believe that listening tendencies of school boards and teacher groups is based on the beliefs of each different school district. I guess, as a whole nation, we actually tend to listen to those who are seeing/speaking for the underachieving students-whether they support them or not. I believe this because our current legislation is focused on the improvement of the lower percentiles of our student population and not the upper percentiles.