Role Playing and Survey Feedback for Administrator Interns

Abstract

A recent brief summary of new learning tech niques in professional education1 lists among them problem solving in the case teaching technique, simula tion and gaming, programed instruction, computer as sisted instruction, and closed circuit television. Each of these techniques offers advantages over the traditional lecture-recitation, but in general they are still oriented more towards clarifying the substantive content of problems than towards understanding the interpersonal processes involved in solving them. This is not to say that case studies, for example, do not often include di mensions of human relations which must be considered in reaching a satisfactory solution. What is often over looked, however, is that a group which is discussing a case involving interpersonal processes is itself engaging simultaneously in these processes. Analyzing these in teractions can often be as valuable in understanding the role of group dynamics as the analysis of the case situ ation itself. Using a student's own behavior as a subject for study is not a new idea. It is, in fact, one of the primary objectives of the internship approach. An intern student is able to see the effects of manipulating certain inter personal variables upon changes in a real situation. Even here, however, the opportunity to observe the ef fects of certain variables on interpersonal relations is limited by certain factors. First, the number of inter vening variables over which the student has no control may be so numerous and complex, or so intensive, that it is difficult to relate cause and effect. After working with a faculty member on a problem, an administrator whose style is open, trusting, and helpful can never feel sure that the teacher's overt reactions are related to the administrator's degree of interpersonal competence or to any one of a number of other variables. Overt reactions, moreover, are themselves often not indicative of inner feelings, particularly when status differentials exist be tween the two individuals which require one of them to appear satisfied even when he is not. How, then, can an instructional program be struc tured to permit an administrator to gain personal in sight into the effects of his behavior on others? One possibility is to use role playing and survey feedback. In this technique, students engage in a role playing exercise and then use data collected as part of that exercise as the material to be analyzed. The focus of the analysis is not on the content of the exercise it self, but on the reactions of the individuals involved to the processes employed. When these processes are varied, differences in the reactions of individuals to them can be measured to see if, in fact, they are related to changes in interpersonal perceptions. The student thus serves simultaneously as experimenter, experi mental subject, and interpreter of the experiment, and can gain insight into the effects of certain variables on interpersonal behavior.