Immersive spaces for participation and collaborative reflection

Newly qualified teachers often feel unprepared to engage in professional practice after completing their educational training. One of the key challenges in
this transition is the complexity of classroom management (Klassen & Chiu,
2010) teacher characteristics (gender and teaching level. Existing solutions to
this challenge, such as co-teaching, are perceived as valuable, but are often limited by the fact that they occur in real-time, leaving less room for reflection
between teachers. There is thus a need to create spaces in which teachers can
reflect upon their practices, while maintaining a strong connection to what actually happened, and not just the teachers’ perception of it. Video technology
has a long history within teacher training for creating such spaces. Most video-based teaching evaluation however uses 2D video, which does not fully capture the spatial complexity of a classroom (Gaudin & Chaliès, 2015). 360-degree video recordings can capture this spatial complexity, but in order to fully
utilise the recordings, they must then also be viewed in an immersive environment and not on a flat screen. Immersive Virtual Reality allows for playback of
this nature, giving teachers the ability to not just observe, but feel presence in
the video recording, due to the immersive mediation through Head-Mounted
Displays.
While most VR applications for professional training are concerned with
simulated and individual scenarios (Radianti et al., 2020), our collaborative
360VR approach allows teachers to collectively re-immerse themselves into any
recording of their own classroom, making it possible to pause any given situation in the classroom in order to collaboratively analyse and reflect on the situation. The collaborative reflection is then ‘on-action’ (Schön, 1983), but strongly
connected to the actual practice of the newly qualified teacher through the feeling of presence. The aim of engaging in this collaborative reflection upon the
practice of the newly qualified, is to train the professional judgement (Dau &
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Nielsby, 2021), making the newly qualified teachers better prepared to navigate
the complexity of classroom management.
The poster will present our preliminary work, exploratively interviewing
pre-service- and newly qualified teachers in order to identify challenges regarding classroom management in the transition from education to practice,
and the role of reflection in attending to these challenges. The preliminary work
points towards designing immersive spaces which afford participation and collaborative reflection – spaces in which newly qualified teachers can reflect upon
their practice together with colleagues, preparing the newly qualified teachers
for engaging with the profession.