Virtual Students Are Used to Train Teachers

“We’re not going to have that kind of behavior in here,” she says. “It’s too loud in here to move on.”The student-teacher faces a rowdy class.

The students don’t pay much attention. A boy in the back row, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, slumps his shoulders. Another student waves his hand aimlessly.

“Nah, just stretching,” he replies, when the teacher asks if he needs something.

Scenes such as that aren’t uncommon in urban classrooms, but in this case there is one critical difference: These students are avatars—computer-generated characters whose movements and speech are controlled by a professional actor.

Each of the five characters—all with distinct abilities, personalities, and psychological profiles, and even names like “Maria” and “Marcus”—were created as part of the TeachME initiative at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando. There, teacher-candidates can practice in a virtual classroom before ever entering a real one.

Real-time classroom simulations like TeachME, supporters say, offer promise for a host of teacher-training applications. Through them, candidates could gain hands-on practice with urban students, or practice a discrete skill such as classroom management.

Most of all, such simulations give teachers in training the ability to experiment—and make mistakes—without the worry of doing harm to an actual child’s learning.

“It allows the teacher to fail in a safe environment,” said Lisa Dieker, a professor of education at the University of Central Florida and one of the designers of TeachME. “Real kids, trust me, will remember in May what you said to them in August. You can’t reset children.”

The Florida project is among the most sophisticated experiments with classroom simulations to date, but other projects offer similar benefits. The computer program simSchool, which mimics a classroom setting, can be populated with up to 18 students with different features and emotional characteristics—all of whom will respond differently to stimulus from a teacher-candidate in charge of the virtual classroom.

Though not yet widespread in teacher education, the idea of classroom simulations could receive more attention in coming years, especially with the student-teaching aspect of teacher preparation now receiving scrutiny. Groups such as the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, or NCATE, are pushing for teacher education programs to step up the variety, length, and quality of their field-based experiences.

“There’s a realization that we have to be able to ensure that we can prepare teachers well for the demands of practice,” said Pamela L. Grossman, a professor of education at Stanford University who has written about the place of simulations, among other methods, for practicing teaching skills.

Virtual Classrooms

Both TeachME and simSchool are the product of unusual partnerships linking teacher-educators, researchers, and experts in simulations or immersive media.

Though widely used to train professionals in medicine, nursing, and aviation, simulations are uncommon in the preparation of teachers. Many aspiring educators get about 10 to 14 weeks of student-teaching in local schools.

The idea behind the simulations isn’t to replace traditional face-to-face student-teaching, but to give teacher-candidates the ability to experience specific skill-building lessons, explains David C. Gibson, an associate research professor at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University in Tempe.

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