Lulwa Bordcosh is an Academic Director and ESL Teacher Trainer based in Southern California. Her interests revolve around Blended Learning and she is an advocate of all things Ed-tech. In this final article and accompanying video, Lulwa, considers why Virtual Reality is a beneficial tool for teacher training and development.
Imagine being able to be a student in your own classroom, sitting among fellow classmates, listening to their chatter, paying attention – or not – to the lesson at hand, and being taught, by well, yourself. Now imagine the benefits of doing so. You would be able to see every nook and cranny of your classroom and ponder to yourself: Are my students engaged? Are my explanations clear? Do I effectively vary the use of pair and group work?
Now imagine no further.
360° cameras, a YouTube account, 4K technology, and a simple piece of cardboard have made this a reality, and not one that is in the future, but one that is in the here and now and at the fingertips of every teacher in every school.
In using virtual reality, we are able to completely redefine the way in which we conduct teacher observations.
When I hand a teacher a pair of goggles and sit beside them as they travel through their own lesson, the evaluation is instantly transformed into an exploration, one that is self-directed and observed, not judged. In so doing, teachers attain a valuable sense of self-awareness that enables them to see areas for improvement and set their own goals. In this sense, evaluation and development become one in the same and are no longer mutually exclusive.
It is a sad irony that so much debate surrounds the way in which we assess our students, yet little has changed in regard to how we assess our teachers. We are still sitting in the back of the classes, checking boxes, using some standardized rubric, just as has been done for decades.
Evaluating teaching performance is just that, an evaluation of a performance, an art, one that cannot be given a score out of 100. It is different than other professions where performance can be quantified and based on, for example, quarterly sales targets, ROI, or percent growth. Teachers are not salesmen, venture capitalists, or bankers and as such, should not be assessed in the same manner.
What defines “good teaching” is subjective. There is not a rubric, teacher trainer, or academic in the world who can definitively lay out the metrics of such. VR encourages us to challenge all this. It challenges the way we view our world and encourages us to see that perspective comes from all angles, across every axis, and within each one of those 360°.
Find out more about the benefits of VR for teacher training in this video from Lulwa and her teaching staff:
Explore Lulwa’s previous article on how students’ learning can benefit from virtual reality in the ESL classroom and see what inspired her to bring VR into the language classroom by reading Paul Driver’s post How can we use virtual reality to teach English?