The Potential of Simulation for Teacher Assessment

A teacher’s classroom skills, attitudes, and behaviours are fundamental to excellent teaching. Assessing these qualities is a logistically difficult, costly, and at times, controversial task for teacher educators and school administrators. As a result, teacher hiring and subsequent professional development rely on indirect indicators that provide only limited evidence of a teacher’s potential, strengths, and areas for improvement. Simulation techniques have been used as training and feedback tools for many years in occupations where live practice is dangerous, costly, or difficult to organize. Today’s technologies are making simulations practical in new domains. In teaching they can provide practice settings, performance data, and feedback aimed at evaluating and improving a wide range of skills. Drawing from experience in medical and health education, this chapter outlines the potential for simulations to support both teacher hiring and in-service skills development, in order to support teaching excellence with new tools in the future.