Title
VR Classroom Management Application
About our project
Approximately 50% of new teachers leave the field within their first five years; struggles with classroom management are a vital reason. We know that classroom norms are established early in the academic year, so starting this process successfully is crucial to successful teaching. Virtual reality offers a unique context to practice such crucial skills because it allows initial failure to be productive while avoiding lasting harm (to candidates, supervising teachers, or their students). While others have used VR to train specific teaching strategies or to assess candidates’ self-efficacy, VR is still relatively new to teacher preparation, and much remains to be learned about its optimal application.
This VR application serves as a training tool for pre-service teachers (undergraduate students) to practice giving presentations to classes where misbehavior occurs. The goal is for the pre-service teachers to practice establishing classroom norms via redirects as responses to varying levels of distracting misbehaviors. This application provides an immersive environment (a k-6 themed VR classroom) where the users can freely walk around, explore the classroom, and interact with the students (avatars). Most importantly, the application enables a coach or proctor to dynamically control the avatars’ misbehaviors, creating different realistic scenarios for the pre-service teachers to react to.
The virtual classroom has 20 non-descriptive students sitting at five large tables to show different scenarios. Each table has four students. Each of the 20 students has a range of five categories for misbehaviors to distract from the lecture being given. Examples of the misbehaviors: daydreaming; talking to a neighbor; humming/singing to self; refusing to stay on task; phone going off; chatting with a neighbor; throwing paper planes/items; throwing paper balls at teacher; emotional breakdown (flipping desk, flailing arms). See the photos below.
Acknowledgment
This project was funded by Purdue Instructional Innovation Grants.