Welcome to our video showcase.

We thank you for taking the time to watch and provide feedback to our exciting 3-day conference.  As you watch our video, we would enjoy hearing your thoughts on these questions. Thanks for watching and have a fantastic week! 

1. How do you use simulations to support pre-service and in-service teachers in mathematics and science teacher preparation and professional development?
2. In what ways do you think simulations could be best used to help pre-service and in-service mathematics and science teachers learn?
3. What challenges have you experienced or do you anticipate with integrating simulations into teacher preparation and professional development settings?
4. What research do you think is most important to help the field understand how, in what ways, and for what purposes simulations support mathematics and science teachers in learning?

Hi Lisa and Team,

Thanks for putting together the video. I was wondering if you would share some more about what some of the major themes were that came out of the conference related to the use of simulations in teacher preparation.

Daniel thanks for your question.  I think for me the big takeaway was that we did not all know about each other's work. I also was impressed with how many people applied to attend the conference, so we had to be very selective. Another big takeaway for me was that we really don't have a good use of terms (thesaurus) we can use to find each other's work. We are talking about trying to have some synergistic terms we all use if we are simulating using standardized patients, role plays, case studies, mixed-reality simulation, game-based simulation.  My final takeaway was that we are all doing work to approximate practice, but we need further synergistic research to show how we can collective better impact teacher preparation in mathematics and science. 

Thanks for sharing! While I know a little bit about the use of simulations in teacher learning, I had no idea that so many people were doing work in this area. Does your dissemination plan for the conference include helping the field better understand both the affordances and challenges of use of simulations?

Molly,

Thanks for watching our video and great question!  Yes, we are working on a white paper and a follow-up meeting to continue our discussion. We definitely see a need for a roadmap for the field in usage and understanding of simulation.  We also see a great need for synergy around our understanding and use of terms much like exists for pilots, military, or medical training. We were impressed with the range of ideas in the field so harnessing those ideas is definitely in our plan and to disseminate those collective ideas. 

What a great conference! Do you have long term plans or items that emerged from this work to inform future conferences? Were there certain themes that emerged out of this?

Thanks for taking a look at our video. There were definitely a lot of different ideas that emerged from the conference that could inform future conferences. One of the ideas was about the need to create some type of repository to be able to better disseminate and share the various simulation tasks, training materials, and use cases across the live and digital simulation spaces -- figuring out how best to do so, what resources to include, and how to develop a productive tool that could be used across different audiences would definitely be useful. Other ideas that emerged focused on designing research studies to study the affordances and limitations of different models and approaches that incorporate simulations to understand the ways in which they support both teachers' and their students' learning. In the next few months, we also will be producing a white paper to share the outcomes of this conference.

And given that the threaded discussion closes today, let me just say that if you're happening upon this video later and you'd like to reach out about future work, we'd love to hear from you!