Creating Families

This article examines an alternative marriage and family teaching method that provides students with a realistic clinical experience and increases their empathic understanding of family diversity. When the instructor incorporates a highly structured role-play protocol into the syllabus, students learn to create realistic family scenarios, without falling prey to the two main traps of role-play: the ill-prepared example that does not represent real cases; and the ethical problem in which students select characters too similar to themselves.