About the Application
Product Name: MIT Teaching Systems Lab (TSL)
URL: https://tsl.mit.edu/projects/practice-spaces/
Publisher: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cost: free
Goals
The Practice Spaces collection of tools allows teachers the space to to practice teaching strategies in a low-stakes setting. The developers have created a series of gamified simulations that enable practicing critical teaching skills.
Pros
TSL includes a variety of tools and resources for faculty, such as:
- Teacher Moments, media interactive case studies, which offers real-time practice dealing with common student issues. This appears to be most valuable tool for training pre-service teachers. The demo looks promising and it is open source.
- Motivation Station, a printable card game that creates scenarios for teachers to practice motivating students.
- Surfacing and Addressing Unconscious Bias, an interactive that teaches ways to identify unconscious bias and address it with their students.
- Eliciting Learning Knowledge: a role-playing game that provides the opportunity to practice interacting with students to understand preconceptions and question strategies.
- Other tools for classroom or workload management.
Cons
The learning activities don’t seem to be connected by any consistent theme or mechanics of use. This could place additional load on someone attempting to practice these skills.
The most promising tool, Teacher Moments, will require some information technology knowledge as it would need to be set up on a web site.
Users must use Google’s Chrome browser to access the demo content. It is unclear if there is a production version available for use.
Program Evaluation
Teacher Moments allows teachers to interact with scenarios and respond with voice prompt. It appears that there is some artificial intelligence that enables a response from the system to help the teacher learn the skills used in the scenarios. The concept has potential, but may need additional effort to be more readily available for a variety of systems and users.