The use of virtual simulations in teacher education to develop pre-service teachers’ behaviour and classroom management skills: implications for reflective practice

Abstract

Dealing with the often-overwhelming nature of the school placement experience and the associated demands of classroom management can be a significant challenge for many preservice teachers. These challenges point to the need for pre-service teachers to experience aspects of challenging pupil behaviour in less pressurised environments and where they can have the opportunities to make mistakes without fear of negative repercussions on their academic progression. The use of virtual simulations is increasingly seen as an opportunity to provide pre-service teachers with unique opportunities to experience examples of classroom life in a controlled and structured environment. With these benefits in mind, this paper explores the growing use of virtual simulations in pre-service teacher education and in particular their use in developing pre-service teachers' behaviour and classroom management skills. It highlights issues that teacher educators need to be cognisant of in using them with student teachers, particularly the extent to which they cement existing stereotypes about pupil behaviour and the extent to which they subsequently limit rather than enhance opportunities for critical reflection.

Virtual Reality in Teacher Education From 2010 to 2020: A Review of Program Implementation, Intended Outcomes, and Effectiveness Measures

“…Increasingly, research that focuses on training core teaching practices via simulations has utilized VR environments for its realism and controllability (e.g., Cohen et al 2020;Dalgarno et al 2016;. VR is advocated by these researchers because it aids in bridging the gap between abstract theory and practical teaching skills, providing feedback with vivid examples, and relieving pre-service teachers' performance stress by ensuring a safe environment for practice and experimentation (McGarr 2020). These benefits are attainable because of the unique features and affordances of VR which will be introduced in the next sections.…”

“…Virtual reality (VR), as the digital technology that recreates lifelike experiences in virtual environments, has opened up new possibilities and more opportunities for situated practice in teacher education (Billingsley et al 2019;McGarr 2020).…”

“…VR environments have long been used in professional training within various fields (for a review, see Jensen and Konradsen 2018), such as surgeons (Alaraj et al 2011) and fire fighters (Morélot et al 2021). Yet, the application of VR in teacher training has only evolved noticeably in the last decade (McGarr 2020). With the exponential growth of consumer-level VR hardware and software during the last decade (Hodgson et al 2019), both the creation and application of VR in the educational context has become increasingly feasible and scalable (Hamilton et al 2020).…”

The Effect of Virtual Reality Technology on the Imagery Skills and Performance of Target-Based Sports Athletes

“…VR is widely used in many fields such as education (Lorenzo et al, 2020;McGarr, 2020;Radianti et al, 2020;Theelen et al, 2020), medicine (Bhattacharjee et al, 2020;Felipe et al, 2020;Maier et al, 2020a;Xin et al, 2020), computer games (Bapka et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2018;Allspaw et al, 2019), new motor skills acquisition (Prasertsakul et al, 2018;Ricca et al, 2018;de Moraes et al, 2020), virtual sights (Errichiello et al, 2019;. VR studies in sports focused on three areas: performance analysis (Ouadahi et al, 2016;Neumann et al, 2018), simulation development (Pereira et al, 2018) and virtual training (Adamovich et al, 2009;Calabro et al, 2017;Akbas et al, 2019).…”

Öğretmenlerin Sanal Sınıf Yönetimi Yeterlikleri

“…Bu bileşenler ve öğretim yöntemlerinin esas alınmasının öğretmenlerin sanal sınıf yönetimi yeterliklerinin gelişmesine olumlu katkılar sağlayabileceği söylenebilir. Ayrıca, öğretmen adaylarının sınıf yönetimi becerilerini geliştirmede sanal simülasyonlardan yararlanılması(McGarr, 2020), etkileşimli öğretim materyalleri geliştirilmesi ve kullanılması…”