Virtual Reality for Teacher Training: An Experiential Approach to Classroom Conflict Management

Introduction

Learning to manage the daily conflicts that affect the classroom climate in Secondary education is imperative in the initial teacher training. Historically speaking teacher training for Secondary education has been a neglected field and vaguely studied in comparison, for example, to Primary education according to the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) conducted in 2018 (Schleicher, 2020). This survey shows that Spain, for instance, is well below the average for teachers who refer to having received training regarding the management of students' conflicting behavior and classroom climate. Less than half of Spanish teachers (40%) reported that they felt prepared to control a class. On the other hand, the study reveals that Spanish teachers excelled in their responses to maintaining order in class.

In fact, the teacher's ability to stimulate and motivate students to develop responsible learning is identified among the key factors for the development of a positive climate. As Everston & Poole (2008) reminds us, despite the best-laid plans, student misbehavior will occur. Reactions to this misbehavior require careful planning to ensure a teacher’s responses are productive. A teacher who motivates and contributes to a good classroom climate is one who makes the goals of the program and its expectations evident, knows his students, and instills in them the value of work and effort; at the same time, he values them and gives them formative and timely feedback (Winstone et al, 2017).

Therefore, providing teachers with a set of fundamental instruments and competencies to ensure and produce a good classroom climate should be an integral part of any initial or continuing professional development program. However, despite the undoubted importance of this topic, according to recent reports, in general, future teachers are dissatisfied with the theoretical nature of this training and consider the practical training received to be deficient (Hamit & Yildirim, 2020; Sarceda-Gorgoso et al., 2020). Consequently, teachers face the classroom without having the fundamental pedagogical and communicative skills to manage not only the learning process but also the interpersonal relationships within the institutional context to ensure and promote a positive classroom climate.

Certainly, teachers must build communication competency, “develop[ing] a diverse pool of communication strategies and tactics to draw from” and be able to choose among them to fit the people involved as well as the context (Hocker & Wilmot, 2014). The lack of training in classroom management, as well as the development of communicative competences, could potentially be resolved through the introduction of an initial training program with virtual reality (VR) to enhance preservice teachers’ communicative skills and increase their ability to respond to frequently arisen conflicts in Secondary classrooms.

Exploiting the experiential, experimental, and scientific component that accompanies this technology (VR), could allow teachers to put into practice these competences in a safe and exciting environment. Several studies argue the need for training teachers to face this challenge in learning contexts that allow experimentation and reflection on practical performance (Clarà et al., 2019; Sorensen, 2014).

Against this background, this chapter presents a VR system specifically designed by a group of developers and educational psychologists to address this need. The authors witnessed its potential to build, model, and develop the necessary communicative competence needed to manage conflict in a Secondary School classroom as a valuable alternative for preservice teacher training within a safe environment. We set out to demonstrate how implementing a VR training proposal could contribute to developing preservice teachers’ key communicative competences to manage classroom climate while providing accurate information on which emotions are positively or negatively involved in classroom conflict management.

Along with this chapter we, first, describe and highlight the characteristics of the classroom climate to explain the complexity of managing disruptive behaviors as well as the importance of identifying the affective and attitudinal factors that motivate teachers’ current strategies while managing classroom climate. We also cite research that supports the premise of conflict management as a learning opportunity and the desirability of experiential learning and critical reflection. Next, we address the distinctive features of virtual learning environments to enable the creation of an optimal environment for teachers’ education. Finally, we present the VR system we have developed for this purpose and advance a training proposal to implement it.