Abstract:

Over the last few decades, teacher education programs have been criticized for the ineffectiveness in preparing high qualified, competent, and skillful teachers. Observing such weaknesses, Ball and her colleagues (Ball & Forzani, 2009) call for a practiced-based teacher education program wherein “the work of practitioners” is the center of professional education. Having a similar vision, Grossman and her colleagues (Grossman et al., 2009) identified three key aspects of professional education: representations of practice, decompositions of practice, and approximations of practice. Among these three key pedagogies for teacher education, approximations of practice—“opportunities to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practices of a profession” (Grossman et al., 2009, p.2058)—are very powerful tool for novices to experience “instructive failure” and experiment with different instructional decisions. To approximate teaching practices, researchers have adopted different approaches such as rehearsals, animated classroom stories, videos, non-digital simulations, and digital simulations.

This study explores the affordances of using a digital simulation to approximate the core teaching practice of eliciting student thinking for preservice teachers (PSTs). This study examines the following three research questions:
(1) What questions do PSTs ask to elicit student thinking?
(2) To what extent do PSTs utilize “pause” session during digital simulation? And what kinds of feedback, suggestions, or comments do other fellow PSTs offer to the PST interacting with the virtual students during the “pause” session?
(3) How do PSTs reflect on the simulation experience?

To answer the research questions above, this study was conducted in an elementary mathematics methods course in the U.S. During the simulation, six PSTs have 10 minutes to interact with virtual avatars and other PSTs provide comments, feedback, and suggestions as peer-coaches. Two teacher educators—one is the simulation expert and the other is the content expert—facilitated the two-hour digital simulation session.

Overall, PSTs started with generic questions but later asked more content-specific questions. Each PST had his or her own pattern of asking questions (e.g., focusing on method, operation, or similar strategies) and repeated similar questions to different avatars. The number of PST-initiated “pause” ranged two to four times but they mainly paused the session when they had difficulty in handling students’ non-mathematical comments or searching for accurate mathematical vocabulary to use. The number of avatars selected, the duration of interaction with one avatar’s idea, and the pattern of questions also varied by PSTs. In the reflection paper, the PSTs mentioned that they felt intimidating and overwhelmed to interact with avatars in front of their classmates and professors. However, all PSTs highlighted the benefits of simulations to learn the core teaching practices. The digital simulation provides opportunities for preservice teachers to interact with students in a more authentic and safe environment and to engage in “deliberate practice” in a more controlled setting by using the power of pausing, giving immediate feedback, having multiple opportunities to rethink and re-enter to instructional interactions, providing peer-coaching, and finally making a better instructional decision.

Keywords:

Approximation of teaching, elicit student teaching, digital simulation, practice-based teacher education, long division.