Luis Zaragoza's article for the OrlandoSentinel.com discusses the use of a virtual classroom to train teachers to deal with disciplinary issues and practice classroom management.
In a virtual classroom, five computers are programmed with distinct personalities, many of which would be considered discipline issues in the real world. The teacher must deal with the issue (rather than send the student for a "time out"). Administrators can also infiltrate the computers to make them "act up" in a certain way.
While the idea of allowing teachers to develop strategies without using real students as guinea pigs is intriguing, this virtual classroom frustrates me. Without seeing this program in action, I believe this virtual classroom has some pitfalls. One of the amazing dynamics in the classroom is how eye contact, personal contact, and rapport works both between students and teacher, and students with other students. I do not think this can be simulated. Hence, the strategies that might work with real students may not work with virtual ones. Also, this simulation appears to be much more difficult than an actual classroom in that administrators can prevent the virtual student from responding to the teacher's management. Is the purpose just to frustrate the beginner teacher and scare him/her into thinking that these strategies won't work? One of the originators of the program (Dieker) states, "Kids remember for a long time when things go wrong." My answer to that is, "So do teachers."
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As a person working with the classroom (Dieker) it is the human avatar in the loop that we hope will provide the "just in time" and "just right experience". For once in the classroom we can decouple behavior and academics and allow people to practice either of these issues separately or together.
You are so right Sarah that the art of teaching is too complex and we don't want to scare people off. Yet we also want to make sure that people have a safe and most would say fun environment to practice that does not involve our kids.
I appreciate your thoughts and we hope to use this environment to recruit, retain and prepare teachers but not to frighten those away who should stay. My dream is in 10 years in just 10 minutes maybe we can start to be better predictors of who will come, stay and most importantly make the biggest impact on our most precious resource our kids. Currently we spend over 5 billion a year replacing an unstable teaching force (turn over is every 3-5 years in some fields) so we hope to help stop the turn.
Thanks for your thoughts - as this is uncharted territory for teacher preparation so all insights are helpful.
Best regards,
Lisa Dieker
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