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Faculty of Management, Economics and Social SciencesTeacher Training Tool

Goals

  • To create a concrete situation and explore a real case
  • Enhance critical skills

The role-play will enable students:

  1. To face and assess a real situation that could arise in the retail sector
  2. To highlight the objective difficulties and their own shortcomings in knowledge of managing a ‘normal’ situation arising in one field of the retail sector
  3. To highlight their own qualities (learned and inborn) and to manage skills in handling (satisfying) a client and/or in managing a crisis situation or a problem
  4. To enable cross-evaluation of the student/trainee: an ‘internal’ evaluation (self- evaluation) and three ‘external’ evaluations (customer, supervisor, and quality control group)
  5. To enhance students’ critical abilities but also to help them better to understand the personal and objective difficulties that they may encounter during their future work in the retail sector

Players: four teams

      a)     The customer(s)

      b)     The retailer (s)

      c)     The manager(s) of the shop

      d)     The quality control group (external assessment)

The classroom is transformed into a shop (or factory, depending on the type of school), and the teacher has the opportunity to decide, depending on the thematic focus and interest of the class, which of the following two scenarios he/she wants to implement in class. Both are typical situations arising in the retail sector that could easily occur in practice (goods being unavailable, a fussy or arrogant customer, unexpected demand for a specific product, etc.).

Once the role-play is complete, the reflection phase starts. It may be implemented in two different ways:

  • through the comments of the quality control group

  • through a simple customer satisfaction questionnaire (provided by the TLA, but also adaptable by the teacher, according to his/her needs)

Goal: Writing an assessment of service can help students to enhance their critical skills but also to focus on a specific problem. Feedback from classmates can also have a confirmatory or corrective effect on students’ self-image, entailing a process of peer education.