Gaining Confidence, Knowledge, and Skills Through Virtual Rehearsals

• In Event: Opportunities and Challenges Associated With Approximations of Practice in Teacher Education Programs

Abstract

The move to online learning has steadily increased over the past decade, with a sudden and rapid transition taking place in response to COVID-19 in 2020. The authors of this proposed chapter seek to highlight how equitable instruction may be affected by this shift to online strategies, and to explore the implications for preparing pre-service mathematics teachers (PSTs) to use equitable teaching practices. In particular, we take up the question of virtual rehearsals in lieu of in-person field experiences, drawing on exploratory work conducted in the Mursion™ environment. We seek to make visible the ways in which equitable instructional practices may be supported or undermined in such environments differently than they are in in-person field experiences.
Virtual rehearsals, or simulations of teaching, are an online learning intervention that can be used to provide PSTs opportunities to practice teaching, and which have grown more popular in recent years as technological advances have met with a field-wide push toward practice-based teacher education (Grossman et al., 2009; Ball & Forzani, 2009). In the wake of COVID-19, they stand as a viable approach to ensuring PSTs still have opportunities to practice the interactive work of teaching. Additionally, scholars have argued that they have unique affordances that go well beyond convenience, including the ability to target PST learning in desired ways well as the opportunity they afford to place PSTs in potentially uncomfortable situations without affecting real children (Dotger et al., 2014). However, they also introduce a set of challenges related to representations of children in ways that could be or be perceived to be stereotypical.
The problem that this study aimed to address is PSTs not having adequate opportunities to learn about or practice equitable math teaching practices during field experiences due to COVID-19. The research questions the study aimed to answer were: Do PSTs notice the race or gender of the student avatars? Do PSTs exhibit equitable teaching practices? In the Fall 2019 semester four secondary math PSTs engaged in repeated virtual teaching rehearsals using Mursion™. The Equity QUantified In Participation (EQUIP) rubric (Reinholz & Shah, 2018) rubric was used to investigate PSTs equitable teaching practices. Participants were also interviewed and asked to complete a survey. Findings indicate that PSTs notice gender and race but vary, for a given student avatar, in these identifications. PSTs also notice stereotypical activity exhibited by the avatars. Additionally, results of this study suggest that PSTs do not consistently exhibit equitable practices in regards to race or gender. More research is needed to confirm these findings and to develop repeated virtual rehearsal interventions to address the issue of inequitable practices.

Author

• Liza Bondurant