My project works with teachers from rural schools in the Northern Province of South Africa. We are trying to help them understand and implement new national education policies such as Curriculum 2005 and "democratic" school management, and we have used role-play activities extensively in workshops to get beyond departmental rhetoric to some "Ah-ha!" moments when we've all been able to see and feel what these policies might be like in practice. We have also used case studies, simulations and lifeboat debates, all of which require the teachers to solve a problem or put themselves in someone else's shoes.

Some questions that we have tackled through role-play are:

• What does learning look like?
• How do you know when learners are "performing" the Critical and Developmental Outcomes?
• How can you explore values without forcing your opinions on the learners?
• How do meetings work and what are the roles of the chairperson, secretary and other participants?

Our favourite kind of role-play is the "fishbowl", where some of the participants do the activity and the others observe and analyse it. Here is our "What does learning look like?" fishbowl. The class was divided into groups of 6. Each group had 4 participants and two observers. The participants did an exercise that we had found in a manual published by the Johannesburg-based NGO, COUNT, in which they pretended that they owned a spaza shop and had to do some arithmetic before making decisions about storage space, selling prices and whether they could afford to hire a helper. The observers watched the participants at work and took notes about the roles played by different group members and the ways in which they went about doing the maths. Once again, the exercise ended with a report-back during which the observers did most of the talking. Fortuitously, different groups had used different ways to calculate the volume of the storage space so we had a very good discussion about how there are many possible valid ways to solve a problem.

You have seen that I am a role-play fan - perhaps even a role-play evangelist. I enjoy the way that the whole class can become absorbed in these activities and the fact that their feelings are engaged as well as their minds. I like the fact that a role-play gives the class a shared experience to discuss and refer to, and I have learned to trust these exercises to generate lively discussions. I believe that the teachers give high quality responses after a role-play. I know that they enjoy using colloquial language and doing the role-plays in TshiVenda. However, like any classroom technique, role-play has its problems.

Our role-plays work best when they involve controversial issues and when they enable the teachers to draw on their own experiences. The school meeting, for example, worked well because all the participants have experienced these. I occasionally think out role-plays that the teachers find inauthentic, and they are invariably flops. Now I'm very careful to test my ideas with my VhaVenda colleagues before I use them with a class. I sometimes get the teachers to suggest topics or to tell me why an idea isn't working so that it can be "fine-tuned" while we are doing the activity.

Role-plays are time-consuming. We are fortunate in having 2-hour sessions to work in, but in previous jobs I've managed to spread them over an hour and a half, with a single period for preparation and a double for the role-play and report-back. It's better not to delay the debriefing, because all the excitement and feelings get dissipated if this happens. Although the debriefing sessions are often the pedagogic climax of the work, they can be tedious for participants who are flushed with their acting success and so it's best to keep them quick and focused.

Our role-plays sometimes take unexpected turns - the discussion about advocating versus imposing policy is a case in point. Often, the unexpected turns out to be very valuable and so we have learned to go with the flow. It is possible to step in and stop or redirect a roleplay that seems to be leading the class down a cul-de-sac, but this tends to destroy the excitement of the experience.

Some of the teachers feel that role-playing is a waste of time. One of them keeps complaining about my "delaying tactics", and another asks to be given notes instead. I retreat to the moral high ground that OBE has created for experiential learning, but I am beginning to accept reluctantly that the technique does not suit everybody.

Obviously, a role-play is not sufficiently powerful on its own to shift teachers' practices - from chalk and talk and Q and A to activity based learning, for example, or from working in a rigid hierarchy to introducing a collegial work culture. But our teachers do say that we make them think about doing things differently, and that's encouragement enough for now.