Fostering Preservice Teachers' Classroom Management Competence in a Simulated Inclusive Classroom

• In Event: Using Simulations to Prepare Teachers for Equitable Education

Abstract

Inclusive classrooms, where students with heterogeneous characteristics – such as special needs – are taught together, is one approach to overcome educational inequalities (e.g., Ainscow, 2007). For enabling successful learning processes in inclusive classrooms, teachers need classroom management competence, which allows them to maximize the effective learning time and to establish an adequate learning climate in their classroom. Important aspects of a successful classroom management are a) productivity, b) behavior management, and c) instructional learning formats (Pianta, La Paro & Hamre, 2012). In Germany, classroom management competence is not explicitly embedded in teacher education at university and it is taught as a facet of general pedagogical knowledge (König, 2013). Furthermore, there are only few opportunities to apply the acquired theoretical competence in practical situations during teachers’ university studies. To overcome the discrepancy between theory and practice, Serious Educational Games (SEG) are a promising approach to foster professional competences – including attitudes and motivation – in real-life situations (Koenig, Iseli, Wainess & Lee, 2013).
Against this background, the presented study aims for developing and evaluating a SEG-based tool to train pre-service teachers’ classroom management competence in an inclusive fourth-grade classroom. The leading research questions are:
1) Do pre-service teachers, who use the new tool (experimental group; EG), gain more classroom management competence than pre-service teachers, who participate in a parallel seminar without the tool (control group; CG)?
2) How do pre-service teachers’ attitudes and motivation develop in the EG compared to pre-service teachers in the CG?
For answering the research questions, a longitudinal experimental study design was used. Pre-service teachers in both seminars (EG and CG) received the same input on instructional quality, whereas students in the EG additionally worked with the SEG tool. This tool consisted of 19 short classroom scenarios, where the pre-service teachers had to react to a situation in terms of classroom management (e.g., dealing with disruptive students). Students in this simulated classroom were heterogeneous regarding, gender, achievement level, migration background and special needs. At the beginning and at the end of the term, pre-service teachers’ self-reported classroom management competence, attitude towards inclusive classrooms, self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation to teach in inclusive classrooms was assessed using established questionnaires. Altogether, two cohorts of pre-service teachers participated in this study (winter term 2020-21, summer term 2021) and the final sample size will be around 150 pre-service teachers. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, seminars and data assessment were conducted online. Data collection will be finished by the end of July 2022.
The presented study will provide new evidence on how to foster pre-service teachers’ classroom management competence already during their university studies. Later on, the newly developed tool can be used in teacher education to enable pre-service teachers to connect their theoretical knowledge with practice in simulated real-life situations.

Authors

• Annika Ohle-Peters, TU Dortmund University

• Nele McElvany, TU Dortmund University