Development of a Virtual Classroom for High School Teacher Training

摘要

In order to deal with the diversity of problems, teacher trainees need not only knowledge but also repeated practice to accumulate experience. In Japan, however, the training of teachers mainly relies on in-classroom lectures in universities. It is compensated with the practice for a relatively short period, say only two to three weeks in real schools. Even though there may be some chances for practicing teaching skills in the teacher-training course provided by universities, these practices are usually conducted by peer role-playings in small number of participants. This is far from real situations where they have to face dozens of teenagers. The teacher-training courses in Japan obviously lacks the practice in teaching skill and the admission of classes. The result is, many young teachers left their jobs in the first year due to frustration and other mental issues. Therefore, we started a project of building a virtual classroom as a training system for the candidates of high school teachers.