Meaningful Practice

Novice teachers need to develop foundation teaching skills to effectively address student behavior and academics in the classroom. The TLE TeachLivE™ simulation laboratory (TLE) is a virtual classroom used to supplement traditional didactic instruction and field experiences in teacher preparation programs. In this study, repeated practice and structured feedback were provided to preservice special educators in TLE to improve their delivery of specific praise, praise around, and error correction. Their weekly performance was observed in TLE during simplified teaching scenarios in intervention and during more complex teaching scenarios following intervention. In addition, their generalization of target skills to their own classrooms was measured weekly. Overall, teachers improved delivery of the target skills in the virtual classroom. They generalized performance to real classroom settings with varying levels of proficiency. Implications for teacher preparation are discussed, including the impact of aligning simulated practice opportunities and authentic teaching environments.