Simulations Help Novices Hone Skills, p. 1
Classroom simulation programs are being used to provide teacher candidates with opportunities to work in virtual classrooms with different groups of students and to develop their classroom management skills. TeachMe is one such program, which is being used at the University of Central Florida. Another program is simSchool, which features the ability to define up to 18 individual students with different emotional characteristics and response patterns, so that the teacher candidate will have to adapt his/her methods to these different individual students during the classroom simulation. The idea behind these programs is not to replace actual student teaching but rather to build their skills in a virtual environment where mistakes will not have actual consequences on a child’s education.
The TeachMe program uses an actual actor for each lesson, who plays five roles based on different student personalities and profiles. The actor has a copy of the day’s lesson plan and plays each character in turn in response to the teacher candidate’s classroom instruction. They have no script, only a knowledge of the background of the characters they are to play. TeachMe may appeal to more youthful teacher candidates who have grown up in a world of computer-simulated reality.
The simSchool program is quite sophisticated. It looks at the complexity of the tasks assigned by the user, the different personalities of the students (which can be customized in advance), and the students’ level of involvement in each activity. It tracks student performance based on the actions of the teacher candidate. The virtual students may pay attention, or they may decide to distract their peers. They may understand the lesson, or it may be too difficult for them and they become frustrated. They will reflect different emotional factors (including openness to learning and conscientiousness), different perceptual abilities, and different cognitive abilities such as the general capacity to learn. Results have been encouraging for users of simSchool. Those who have used it report higher levels of “instructional self-efficacy.” They were more resilient in the face of instructional setbacks, which could improve retention rates among new teachers.
[My thoughts: I cannot help but think either of these programs would be a great tool for prospective teachers. They could be used to help them hone their skills prior to their actual practice teaching. I particularly like the capability of the simSchool program for customizing different types of students that the teacher candidate might encounter. It could provide some challenges that might not be present during actual practice teaching, depending on the venue involved.]
Gates Analysis Offers Clues to Identification of Teacher Effectiveness, p. 11
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has financed a Measure of Teaching Effectiveness study. In its December preliminary report it identified two components of teacher effectiveness: teachers’ value-added histories, which were strong predictors of how they would perform in other classrooms or in other school years, and students’ perceptions of their teachers’ abilities to maintain order in the classroom and provide challenging lessons. “Value-added” modeling controls factors such as a student’s past performance in order to attribute learning gains to a specific teacher. Students’ perceptions of their teachers’ abilities included their perceptions that the teachers made the point of their lessons clear, were considerate of their students, and were able to explain the material presented in different ways understandable to students.
The study found that, in every grade and subject, teachers’ value-added histories were strongly predictive of their performance in other classrooms, although there was some volatility in the estimates from year to year. It also found that students’ perceptions of their teacher were consistent across his/her classes, and that the teachers that they gave high ratings to, especially in the areas of classroom management and providing a challenging academic environment, were teachers whose classes consistently made learning gains. Value-added measures of teacher effectiveness held up even when students were given supplemental tests requiring harder tasks such as conceptual questions and open-ended writing (which are more difficult to prepare for). Although there was a positive correlation between test preparation and value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness, this was weaker than other factors.
Some states have moved toward including value-added estimates in teacher evaluations. Few are considering including student perceptions. The study seems to suggest that both factors should be included, as well as other factors such as teachers’ content knowledge and working conditions. Further studies will try to measure student performance when students are randomly assigned to teachers identified as more effective or less effective.
[My thoughts: There have been a number of methodological issues raised by some who question using value-added estimates to measure teacher effectiveness, but these are only hinted at in this brief overview. The article mentions “volatility” in value-added estimates for specific teachers from year to year, for example, without giving statistics to indicate how seriously this volatility could undermine the reliability of value-added estimates. Nor does it talk about how value-added estimates could be skewed by social selection factors such as parents (of good students) wanting to locate near good schools, good teachers wanting to get jobs in good schools, and good students seeking to take classes with teachers who are known to be good teachers. Further studies using students who are randomly assigned to teachers, mentioned in the article, could control for some of these social factors and also yield more reliable results.]
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