Immersive Teaching Simulator for learning to cope with classroom disruptions

Being interrupted or disturbed while teaching or explaining something is a common challenge across many educational settings. Such disruptions to the teaching and learning process can take various forms — laughter, whispering, unauthorized movement, pushing, inappropriate nonverbal behaviour, and more. We are developing an “Immersive Teaching Simulator” that allows future educators to practice coping with such disruptions in a realistic virtual reality (VR) environment. This digital tool has two main objectives: First, to enable prospective teachers to train for challenging classroom situations in realistically simulated pedagogical contexts using VR. Second, to study coping strategies for managing disruptions: how do teachers deal with different types of interruptions, and how do they return to their primary task of teaching and knowledge transmission after being disrupted?

In a music education setting, students accompanied a song introduction or a singing project using either guitar or piano. At the same time, they had to respond to classroom disruptions, such as a mobile phone ringing, students moving disruptively, or teaching materials going missing. The simulation was available in two versions: a classic VR headset with a fully virtual environment, and a mixed reality version in which the students viewed a real room through a camera headset, with virtual students inserted who displayed disruptive behaviour. After each simulation, the students reflected on their perceptions: they were asked to consider whether and how they noticed disruptions, how they would have acted, and to subsequently discuss this in relation to classroom and lesson management. The implementation included a pilot study with two testing points at which perception skills were measured.

In the comparison of the two testing sessions, an overall improvement in students’ perceptual abilities was observed – that is, they noticed classroom disruptions more effectively after the training than before. Initially, students expressed some uncertainty regarding the technology; however, this quickly subsided as they increasingly recognised the simulator’s potential to conduct focused and targeted training situations. Further results are pending.

The “Immersive Teaching Simulator” is being implemented at PHBern for teacher training and is being directly tested and evaluated by PHBern students and their lecturers.