How do Elementary Preservice Teachers Engage With an Equity-Oriented Digital Clinical Simulation?

• In Event: Preparing 21st-Century Teachers With Digital Clinical Simulations: Advancing Equity and Innovation in Teacher Education

Abstract

Developing preservice teachers’ (PSTs) propensity to act equitably in the classroom requires the deliberate development of scaffolded experiences within safe practice spaces in teacher education programs. Simulations have been used to structure scaffolds that support PSTs’ ability to recognize inequitable student participation and motivate action (Dotger, 2011; Self & Stengel, 2020). They have also been used to support the development of a strong education equity mindset (Nadelson et al., 2019). By leveraging digital clinical simulations in an elementary science methods course, this study aimed to identify the types of questions PSTs raise when encountering students trapped in inequitable learning situations, investigate the range of interventions they propose to support students’ equitable engagement in science learning, and analyze their perceptions of their role as teachers. Relevant to these goals, 111 PSTs in an elementary science methods course participated in a digital clinical simulation in the Teacher Moments open-access platform. The simulation’s scenario introduces PSTs to two students from historically minoritized communities who appear disengaged during their 4th-grade science class, and whose teacher does not act in ways that support them. The authors used an inductive content analysis method to analyze PSTs’ questions about these students, their proposed interventions for each child, and their reflections on their roles as teachers. Similar open codes were grouped and used to establish categorical codes (Saldaña, 2013), then compiled in the codebook. The authors coded the selected data independently using the established categorical codebook, assigning each question, proposed intervention, and expressed goal to a categorical code.

Our analysis revealed different types of questions that PSTs posed about the scenario, such as how the classroom teacher defined student “issues,” how the students behaved in other classes, what actions the teacher or school had already taken to address the students’ issues, why the classroom teacher was dismissive, what the students’ home lives were like, why the teacher thought the students had issues, and what steps the PSTs could take to help the students. The PSTs proposed interventions within six distinctive categories: relational, curriculum and instruction, non-cognitive, peers, support, and external resources. Analysis of PSTs’ reflections on their role as teachers showed that most PSTs conceived their role in terms of their responsibility to help students, while others saw their role as providing resources to students. Some PSTs described their roles using emergent metaphors, which are “intuitively held and expressed… [that] naturally appear in a teacher’s language and in his/her unfolding practice” (Craig, 2018, p. 302). PSTs perceived themselves as acting in one or more of these roles as a helper, helping hand, advocate, caretaker, support system, supporter, bridge, tool, problem solver, guide, and/or resource. There were distinctive orientations to how PSTs perceived their roles as teachers but it was unclear whether their responses reflected surface-level or deeper engagement with the critical incidents embedded in the simulation. The findings raise questions about how digital clinical simulations can be effectively structured and coordinated with the teacher education curriculum to enhance PSTs’ development of strong equity mindsets.

Authors

• Zoubeida R. Dagher, University of Delaware

• Christy Metzger, University of Delaware