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If you’re reading this post, chances are that you are one of those lucky few who just happened to posses an innate ability to grasp language. Your teachers called you a “natural” writer. You may have gone through your whole undergraduate career without making a “comma splice” without ever really knowing what a comma splice was. You didn’t quite know the rules, but you knew the rules on an innate level. It’s also likely that you were precocious when it came to reading and writing, and, unlike your classmates, you could write your term paper the night before and still get an A. Somehow, quite naturally, you knew what a term paper should do, and you did it well, exceptionally well.

Chances are that you have taught, are teaching, or will teach a course that requires writing. In every course, there may be one or two students that fit this profile of the “natural” writer. The disjunction occurs when the “natural” writer is now the teacher of writing and believes that every student must be a “natural” writer as well.

To avoid this disjunction, I think a simple task that teachers can do from time to time is role-play: put yourself in your students’ shoes. Doing this with other faculty members, perhaps in a development seminar, while focusing on a specific objective (syllabus or assignment design, understanding a thesis statement, unraveling a work of literature) would be ideal. This is easier said than done, however. Many college instructors would rather, believe it or not, grade papers than role-play as their students. What can be an enlightening experience oftentimes is seen as a silly and sometimes torturous exercise. Many instructors simply cannot role-play as their students; they are unable to put themselves in their students’ shoes not out of shyness or lack of dramatic training, but out of a total disconnect from who their students are and what their students’ experiences are.

In order to most effectively teach students, I think we need to know or at least try to know who they are. We may have many divisions between ourselves and our students–knowledge, age, interests–but role-playing helps us to at least try to imagine who they are. Knowing who they are helps us to know how to close other gaps such as assignment design and what our students produce in response to our assignments, our comments and their revised assignments, our discussion questions and their responses. As unnatural as it may feel to imagine how our students, the majority of which aren’t “natural” writers, receive our teaching, role-playing might be one of the simplest and most effective ways to see how small changes in our teaching can lead to better results.