Exploring the Role of Standardization in Approximations of Teaching Practice

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

Abstract

Digital teaching simulations have become more widely used in teacher preparation programs. They represent a uniquely configurable type of approximation of practice and have a growing body of evidence documenting their potential (e.g. Badiee & Kaufman, 2014; Pandowski & Walker, 2016). In this theoretical manuscript, we discuss how we conceptualize the role of standardization within a digital teaching simulation and draw on examples from two NSF-funded projects to illustrate how a standardized approach provides an avenue for the simulated teaching to be used as an approximation, representation, and decomposition (Grossman et al., 2009).
As part of prior work, we used an evidence-centered design model (Mislevy & Haertel, 2006) to develop a set of performance tasks that were designed to provide preservice elementary teachers (PSETs) with opportunities to practice facilitating argumentation-focused discussions in a simulated classroom (Authors, 2017; 2019). These tasks utilized the Mursion®, platform, in which each PSET meets virtually with a group of five student avatars, who are controlled on the back end by a trained individual who uses technology to sound and move like elementary students and respond in real-time. Each PSET individually facilitates a discussion in the simulated classroom and the video recording can be used for individual and collective reflection.
Each task was designed to create what we call standardization of opportunity (Authors, 2019) where each PSET teaches, in essence, the same lesson to the same five students, and, in doing so, has opportunities to respond to the same student ideas and address the same student misunderstandings. However, each discussion unfolds uniquely in response to the PSETs’ teaching moves. This creates something that cannot exist in more naturalistic forms of approximation, an experience of teaching that is at the same time individualized and common across PSETs, standardized without being scripted. Because of the standardization of opportunity, this also allows the teacher educator (TE) to look for trends and to compare performances, potentially layering onto the experience what Moss (2011) refers to as a conception of quality.
In our work, we found that the simulated teaching, while grounded in the theory of approximations of practice, was often used by TEs in ways that bridged Grossman’s pedagogies of enactment, with careful preparatory activities structured to support component skills (decomposition) before engaging in the simulation (approximation) and the resulting videos used as objects for individual and collective reflection (representation). In each case, standardization of opportunity created an opportunity for collective and comparative activity in ways that are more difficult to support in naturalistic settings. Conceptualizations of approximations of practice often focus strongly on the degree of authenticity afforded by the approximation, which we argue may obscure a more nuanced discussion of the malleable features of approximation (such as degree of standardization) and their appropriateness to different pedagogical goals (Authors, in press). Understanding digital teaching simulations takes on even more urgency in the context of COVID-19’s effect on teacher preparation, as programs grapple with unprecedented limitations on their enrolled preservice elementary teachers’ (PSET’s) opportunities to practice the interactive work of teaching.

Authors

• Heather Howell, ETS

• Jamie N. Mikeska, Educational Testing Service