ORONO, Maine — Virtual reality simulations are changing how people train to enter a growing number of interactive professions. The University of Maine is the latest educational institution to begin using this approach to prepare teachers in training.
Teaching has typically been one of those learn-on-the-job, trial-by-fire professions. The question is whether virtual teaching will give students a leg up when they finally set foot in a real classroom.
Meghan Connelly enters a 2nd-floor classroom at the University of Maine in Orono and walks up to an 80-inch, high-definition TV screen. Susan Gardner, interim dean of the College of Education, gives the teacher-in-training her instructions.
"What you're working with is a middle-school classroom," Gardner says. "And you're a recent college graduate. You have never taught a group of adolescents. Your objective is too establish rapport and rules."
"Hello, Audrey here at Server 2," says Audrey, a real human being who works at a San Francisco start-up called Mursion, where she runs virtual training sessions for teachers. "Just to double check, we're using middle school, behavior level low today. Is that correct?"
"Correct. You all set?" Gardner asks Connelly.
"Yes," Connelly says.
"OK," Gardner says. "Start classroom."
A class of five middle-school avatars appears on the screen.
"Good morning, class," Connelly says.
"Hello, good morning," says Sean.
"How are you today?" Connelly asks.
"Actually, I'm a little bit hungry," Sean says. "How are you?"
Sean, who has red hair, is awkward. Connelly asks the students what they're favorite animals are. CJ, a girl sitting in the back row, chimes in.
"I don't like animals," she says.
"OK," Connelly says. "Anything else you'd like to share?"
"I have a super cute boyfriend," CJ says.
She has been texting with her friends the entire class.
"I saw, CJ, you had your phone out. I just want to say that we're not going to have phones in school. So," Connelly says, trailing off.
"Well, I mean, what if I have to talk to my mom?" CJ says.
"We're not talking to your mom during school," Connelly says. "And if you have anything really desperate, and you need to say something to her, then you can excuse yourself to the office."
After laying down some rules, Connelly moves on to a brief discussion of "Romeo and Juliet."
This scenario, setting expectations for classroom behavior, is one of many that can be created with TeachLivE. The virtual simulation program was created at the University of Central Florida, initially to assist career changers interested in becoming science and math teachers.
More than 70 colleges and universities, including UMaine, are now using TeachLivE to help train their teacher candidates.
"We have, literally, hundreds of them," Gardner says. She says it can be tough to find opportunities for all of these teachers-in-waiting to train inside schools at the same time.
"So this is an opportunity, before they even go out into the field, to try on some of the different theories, some of the practices we've talked about," she says.
A real person, in this case Audrey in San Francisco, actually monitors each virtual session. The program can be tweaked to replicate the far more disruptive behavior that routinely takes place in many classrooms across the country.
But teaching a classroom of avatars simply isn't the same thing as stepping before groups of living, breathing teenagers and all of their attendant emotions and issues. Still, Connelly says she wishes it had been available when she was an undergraduate.
"We start getting in the classroom end of sophomore, junior year," she says. "But I think that this is going to be great for our first years cause they really get a chance to see, this is what teaching feels like. Even, if it's not real kids, it's a real representation of what an adolescent classroom looks like."
The technology is also being used to train teachers who are already well established in the profession.
A three-year research project on TeachLivE is being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The first year of study found that teachers who did four, 10 minute sessions in a simulated classroom went on to outperform their colleagues on a variety of classroom measures.