Teaching
A class-based simulation is one you run inside your own course, in your own room, with the students you already have. No team, no conference, no travel. What follows is the eleven steps in the order you do them, then seven ready-made designs at one, two and three days, free to print and hand to a colleague.
The eleven steps
| Step | For example |
|---|---|
| 1. Identify the objectives | “Every student speaks once, in role, with something at stake.” Or: “Students can explain why the deal failed by naming an incentive rather than a personality.” Write one sentence a student could visibly fail at |
| 2. Decide the format: which body, and what it is doing | A Council configuration negotiating a carbon border fee. A Security Council taking up lethal autonomous weapons. A town board hearing a 40-unit downtown conversion with a parking variance |
| 3. Decide the duration | One period, so everyone speaks once with a consequence. Two days, so students revise a draft they wrote themselves. Three days, so a development on the second day breaks the coalition built on the first |
| 4. Decide the structure: one body or several | One room and one agenda for a first attempt, so a finance minister cannot take a position his own environment minister has to pay for. If you run several bodies, give them one shared question and bring them together for the vote |
| 5. Decide the roles | Roles down the side of a page, agenda items across the top. In one draft the environment ministers had a single turn in a hundred minutes; a climate question added inside item 1 brought them to two |
| 6. Assign the roles | You assign rather than letting students pick, so the chair and the floor-managing roles are spread deliberately. On a second day, rotate them |
| 7. Identify a moderator or leader | You chair, and the clock holds but you cannot watch the room. Or a student chairs, briefed a day ahead with the speaking order in writing, and you keep time from the side |
| 8. Prepare the students | One document, about five days out: the agenda, their role and its positions, the three floor rules, the time limit, the real questions you will ask, and one sourced fact required per question |
| 9. Hold the simulation | A ten-minute opening, a standing break at the halfway mark where students leave their chairs to find allies, and a recorded vote at the end that is genuinely allowed to fail |
| 10. Guide it if you have to, but stand back | Step in for a factual error that would mislead the room, a student criticized as a person, or a real stall. Otherwise let the eight-second silence run; it is usually somebody deciding to speak |
| 11. Hold the debrief | Fifteen minutes at the very least: ten minutes of silent writing, then small groups, then the plenary. When the period runs short, cut an agenda item, never this |
The three steps worth having on paper
The eleven steps · The speaking-turn grid · Running order and floor rules
The eleven steps in full, with worked examples. The grid is for step 5: roles down the side, agenda items across the top, so you can see before the session who never gets a turn. The third is the day-of sheet, with the running order, the three floor rules and the check to make before students walk in.
Two things to build in
Rotate the powerful roles. Baranowski and Weir found that students given high-power roles reported more understanding and found the exercise more worthwhile than students in low-power roles. In anything longer than a single day, rotate the chair, the bench and the floor-managing roles rather than assigning them once.
Structure the speaking, because the participation gap is documented and it is not small. Engel and colleagues found that women participated less relative to their numbers in a Model UN simulation, that the gap cost them grades, that they enjoyed it less and felt less included, and that a short explicit intervention meant to close it backfired. Coughlin found women in the majority at a Model UN conference while men gave most of the speeches and shaped the resolutions. The response is structural rather than exhortative: a named question put to every role, a speaking order rather than a raised hand, a ninety-second limit, and a required answer to a prior speaker.
Seven designs, free to use
Each one is a complete session: the running order minute by minute, the roles, the one structural element that does the teaching, what to name as artificial, and the trap that particular format sets. The one-day design runs unchanged as day one of the longer versions, so you can try the short one, find that it works, and extend it later without rebuilding. If you are going to try exactly one, try the town assembly.
Model EU
One day · Two days · Three days
One joint session, four items that cross the portfolios, and European Council conclusions adopted by consensus in front of everyone.
Model United Nations
One day · Two days · Three days
One committee, one resolution, and a drafting obligation on named sponsor states, because a delegate who is not on a working paper has accomplished nothing.
Model Arab League
One day · Two days · Three days
A majority decision binds only those who vote for it, which turns the vote from a formality into the most interesting moment of the day.
Model Congress
One day · Two days · Three days
One committee, one real bill, and a vote on the rule taken first, so the room discovers that the fight was already had.
Mock Trial
One day · Two days · Three days
Not a whole trial. One contested witness, run three or four times over, with three objections per side, spent or lost.
Moot Court
One day · Two days · Three days
A student bench that has to sign a reasoned ruling, and a rule forbidding any concession you cannot explain away.
Model Town Assembly
One day · Two days · Three days
A planning board hearing decided against the criteria in the ordinance. No background knowledge needed, works at twelve students or forty, and the easiest to build from your own town.
What the research says, honestly
The case for running these is not that they teach facts better than a good lecture. They do not, and the literature has said so for twenty years: Krain and Lantis found different kinds of knowledge rather than more of it, and Raymond found no significant difference in exam scores at all.
What they appear to buy is retention and interest. Wunische found that lecture students learned more at first while simulation students retained more over time. Levin-Banchik found that a simulation followed by an in-class debrief beat every other condition on an unannounced quiz three months later. Bernstein and Meizlish found nothing at the end of the course and real differences three years on, though no difference in political participation.
Two cautions worth carrying. The widely cited meta-analysis showing a large effect on complex skills, Chernikova and colleagues, pools 145 studies of which 126 are medical education, so it is not evidence about a political science classroom. And self-rated gains are the least reliable finding in this area, because students revise their opinion of their former selves downward, which inflates the apparent improvement.
Baranowski and Weir 2010, JPSE 6(3). Bernstein and Meizlish 2003, Simulation & Gaming 34(2). Chernikova et al. 2020, Review of Educational Research 90(4). Coughlin 2013, JPSE 9(3). Engel, Pallas and Lambert 2021, JPSE 17(4). Kartal 2021, JPSE 17(sup1). Krain and Lantis 2006, International Studies Perspectives 7(4). Levin-Banchik 2018, JPSE 14(3). Raymond 2010, ISP 11(1). Wunische 2019, JPSE 15(1).
If you find an error here, or a study we have missed, please say so.
