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New Doctor Hanneke Theelen
On May 12th, 2021, Hanneke Theelen successfully defended her PhD thesis “Looking around in the classroom. Developing preservice teachers’ interpersonal competence with classroom simulations”.
Many preservice teachers experience feelings of anxiety in their classrooms, also referred to as professional anxiety, despite being prepared via theoretical lectures and practical workshops at their teaching education institutes. They experience a gap between lessons learned at the teacher education institute and the actual teaching practice. Classroom management in particular is a major concern for preservice teachers. A strategy to handle these classroom management struggles is creating positive teacher-student relationships, also known as PSTs’ interpersonal competence.
This doctoral dissertation investigated whether classroom simulations (i.e., simplified imitations of actual classroom events) could be used to bridge the gap between the teacher education institute and the teaching practice by developing preservice teachers’ interpersonal competence. The main research question of this dissertation was: How can computer-based classroom simulations be used in teacher education to train preservice teachers’ interpersonal competence to reduce their professional anxiety and increase their self-efficacy?
Two types of classroom simulations were used: (1) virtual internships and (2) 360-degree videos watched with virtual reality headsets and combined with theoretical lectures.
This dissertation showed that classroom simulations are useful tools to train interpersonal teacher behaviour. Furthermore, both classroom simulations had a positive influence on preservice teachers’ self-efficacy and were useful to reduce preservice teachers’ professional anxiety. Classroom simulations appeared to be valuable tools to provide preservice teachers with a more realistic image of the teaching practice and student behaviours they could expect in classrooms, and how they could act as a teacher. Therefore, classroom simulations could smoothen the transition between teacher education institutes and the actual teaching practice and offer the opportunity for preservice teachers to practice their interpersonal competence in a safe learning environment.
