Digital Classroom Simulations Signal New Frontier in Teacher Training

Read more here.  This is so interesting.  I want to try it.  Kathy

By Madeline Will on April 20, 2016 1:20 PM

Imagine a student-teacher in front of a classroom, trying to get control of the classroom. A student might pull out his phone or make a comment that disrupts the rest of the class. The prospective teacher will then use classroom-management techniques that she has learned in her own classes to re-engage the students in the lesson. 

Nothing out of the ordinary. But at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, that classroom is a computer-based mixed-reality simulation. The students are avatars, programmed to be unruly to test prospective teachers' classroom- management skills.

This semester, about 60 education students participated in the education school's pilot program as a required part of their classwork. In the fall, students will use the simulator for practicing instruction and next spring, the focus will be on behavior management, said Stephanie Van Hover, chair of the Curry School's department of curriculum, instruction, and special education, in an email. This will be required for the 150 students in the pre-student teaching placement across the elementary, secondary, and special education fields, she said.

"To be able to start teaching on day one with more proficiency in classroom management and more confidence in your management skills could not be more valuable to a beginning teacher and the students with whom they work," Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School, said in an article about the program in UVA Today, the university's news site. 

Sure, teachers in training can and do learn these skills in real-life classrooms. But researchers and education professors say the classroom simulation has some unique advantages. 

First, it allows teacher candidates to experiment with different classroom-management techniques, honing their own skills instead of having to use a veteran teacher's rules and structures during student-teaching. Second, it allows an opportunity for immediate feedback—at UVA, faculty supervisors are evaluating the student teachers' implementation of classroom management strategies while the simulation is happening. Third, student teachers can feel free to make mistakes in a low-risk environment—they won't hurt a real child's feelings by saying the wrong thing.