Yes, part of the work was seminars for grad students to review literature and learn about student misconceptions in algebra. Preservice teachers developed lesson plans and got feedback before they taught. The grad students used the teachers’ lesson plans to decide the misconceptions they would role play and the questions to ask.

The involvement of both preservice teachers and graduate students , especially the connection between their roles, is really innovative!

Joni, no we haven’t done those comparisons. The preservice teachers say that this helps them think about what they would do in a real classroom. Some complain that it isn’t realistic, but most like the idea of practicing with avatars before their student teaching experience. The problem with real diverse classrooms is that it is hard to “control” the kinds of questions that will be asked, or to expect that kids would actually ask the questions rather than just being silent while the teacher lectures. We don’t let that happen – our avatars plan to ask specific questions about specific misconceptions that they role play.

In line with this, I was wondering why you decided to use Second Life? You used live graduate students to control the avatars, so why not set up a face to face classroom simulation where the graduate students acted as middle school students? What advantages does Second Life have?

This is cool and interesting work with a lot of potential benefits. I’m just unclear as to why Second Life is useful.

We thought that a face-to-face with a grad student, or even a peer would not give the impression that they were actually teaching a middle grade student. The avatars provide a virtual student that could look and act like a kid. Also, we wanted to make the students reflect diversity in terms of their ethnicity, gender, abilities, etc. I think our grad students were more comfortable in their avatar roles than they would have been in real life pretending to be a middle grade student.

Yes, we have found the work with misconceptions very valuable in many ways. One of our findings was that addressing misconceptions was a key predictor of PCK. Our preservice teachers showed better engagement in responding than the comparison group who mainly showed the correct procedure. Still a long way to go but we made some headway.

Joey, thanks for the comment. Moving preservice teachers from typical textbook word problems to problems that were relevant to students’ lives and cultures is a challenge. We used a framework, having them learn about cultural relevance, situated hands-on contexts, and critical pedagogy in an attempt to have them think more deeply about the context of problems.

Thanks for the comment and question, Deborah. The goal for this project was to provide experiences and raise awareness of preservice teachers. We are doing some follow-up interviews with them after they begin teaching but don’t yet have those results. Obviously, this is only one 3-hour course in their preparation, so even if we find they are doing well, it is difficult to say KATE is the main reason – of course we ask them if that is the case. Your question is the one we ask about anything we do in preservice education. Sad to say but my experience is that the pressures of teaching and the attitudes of their colleagues often erase or diminish experiences had during preservice preparation. We hope that KATE is impactful enough to survive into their real practice.

Thanks for the respond. With the changing demographics it is clear that teachers do need to rethink how the material they are teaching is culturally relevant so as to keep the students engaged by asking that very relevant question “what is in it for me to spend all this time learning this material”. I want to believe that preservice teachers should continue to be exposed to program like this that you have created in guiding them to understand that understanding the experiences their students bring to the classroom is foremost important if they are going to learn and believe that the teacher cares and understand them. Looking forward to seeing data as you continue to keep track of the teachers who have been exposed to your system.

We are using two measures of change: a pre-post Likert questionnaire that we adapted (Cultural Awareness and Beliefs Inventory), and pre-post interview with samples of students. On the questionnaire, the participants have exhibited increased levels of awareness and beliefs. You can read some of our research results – refer to the website for references to papers and articles. kate.tamu.edu