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Over the years, game-based learning approaches have been adapted in teaching and learning both to engage and motivate students during learning activities. Game technology, such as serious and simulation games, have been used as a new generation of training educational tools enhancing students’ learning and academic performance. An important aspect in the evaluation of those methods is that it focusses particularly on cognitive learning outcomes, ignoring the significance of other processes including emotional aspects in game environments that also contribute significantly to learning, performance and motivation. The purpose of this paper is to present the empirical evidence of a research related to the emotional experiences of pre-service teachers, after the implementation of a simulated classroom environment during the semester.

SimSchool classroom simulation was used for the training of pre-service teachers in classroom and for behavior management issues. The research took place at the Democritus University of Thrace (DUTH) and the School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (ASPETE), in Greece. This study aimed to gain insights related to the emotions that pre-service teachers experienced during the simulated activities.

The results indicated that participants from DUTH experienced more negative and less positive emotions during the game including anxiety, nervousness, disappointment, insecurity, inability to deal with simSchool activities, defeat, dissatisfaction, fatigue, fear and stress. Moreover, the results revealed that ASPETE’s participants experienced more positive and less negative emotions during playing with the simulation, including excitement, motivation and satisfaction.

The related research on the use of games in teacher training is still at its infancy, the current research aimed to address teacher training through a simulated classroom environment and investigate the emotional experiences of pre-service teachers during simulated activities.

If there are truly impermeable walls between objective research purity, applied science research and development, and advocacy for social justice, then the current system of education, tenure, rewards and recognition should be serving society well now and into the future. However, the world has dramatically changed due to three shaping forces in society: (1) technological flattening of the landscape of opportunity, (2) the rise of the inseparable role of technology in creating knowledge and culture, and (3) the development of complex systems science. These three game changers imply a dramatic rethinking of the foundations of knowledge and practice in all fields because they exert new constraints and open up new opportunities for education concerning the knowledge and skills needed to prepare the next generation of leaders for the global competition of ideas, creativity, and human potential. The 21st century educator capable of transforming learning environments is a person who is a master of these three core concepts. This chapter articulates a vision that is aimed to generate thinking and debate, and like an attractor, pull mental models toward the future as scholarly communities in education grapple with their own next steps and the challenging conversations needed for advancement and innovation in response to the globally changing landscape.

Preparing future teachers requires teacher educators to share both theory and its translation to best practice. Traditional approaches to this learning process include textbooks, case studies, role-play, observation, and eventually fieldwork in a classroom. Understanding what their future students need or appropriately responding to situations in the classroom is far different than the reality of teaching in schools. Although case studies provide an opportunity for perspective taking, collaboration, and developing problem solving skills in a safe environment, it is still a relatively passive experience. The use of virtual worlds to create engaging simulations offers a possibility in bridging this gap between theory and practice. The School of Education and Human Services at Seton Hall University has designed a virtual world simulation to provide college students with the opportunity to be immersed in a virtual classroom setting in which they take on the roles of avatar teachers and grade school students who may require various modifications/accommodations. This chapter will discuss the design and implementation of this project. Data were collected on the students’ experiences in order to assess possible learning gains, affordances of the technology, and lessons learned for future educators who are considering the implementation of virtual world technologies.

Simulation technology has been used as a viable alternative to provide a real life setting in teacher education. Applying mixed-reality classroom simulations to English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher preparation, this qualitative case study aims to examine how pre-service teachers (PSTs) practice culturally and linguistically responsive teaching to work with an English learner (EL) avatar and other avatar students.

Using an embedded single case study, three PSTs’ teaching simulations and interviews were collected and analyzed.

This study found PST participants made meaningful connections between theory and practices of culturally and linguistically responsive teaching, particularly by connecting academic concepts to students’ life experiences, promoting cultural diversity, using instructional scaffolding and creating a safe environment. Nevertheless, they needed further improvement in incorporating cultural diversity into content lessons, creating a challenging and supportive classroom and developing interactional scaffolding for ELs’ language development. The findings also show that while PST participants perceived simulation technology as very beneficial, expanding the range of technological affordances could provide PSTs an opportunity to undertake a full range of critical teaching strategies for ELs.

This research contributes to broadening the realm of mixed-reality technology by applying it to ESOL teacher education and has implications for both ESOL teacher educators and simulation technology researchers.

In the first section of the book, Maureen D. Neumann, Laura C. Jones, P. Taylor Webb, and Olga M. Welch examine the ways in which “new” notions of leadership have influenced leadership development programs. Neumann, Jones, and Webb in the chapter, “Developing Teachers Leaders to Transform Classrooms, Schools and Communities,” advocate for, and offer ways that teachers can become cognizant of their leadership and its effects, so that they can develop deliberate commitments towards social justice in schools which are sites of social, political, and economic influence. They propose a model for leadership that is an alternative to traditional allocations of power through positional hierarchies. According to Neumann, Jones, and Webb, “while school leaders may recognize their actions within a single frame of the model, the practice of leadership is the ability to move in and out of three different conceptualizations of leadership, managerial (transactional), professional development (transformational), and social responsibility (critical).” They propose that effective teacher leaders utilize all three aspects of the leadership domains as a way to adapt to, oftentimes, challenging and rapidly shifting political and economic climates within education. Neumann, Jones, and Webb conclude their chapter with a discussion of pedagogy of possibility and argue that pedagogical content knowledge is a marker of professional teaching competence, and teachers must engage students in the moral and ethical issues surrounding the use of knowledge in our democracy for any subject matter.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how simulations are increasingly used in training programs for the development of skills such as leadership. However, the requirements of leadership development go beyond the development of task specific procedural knowledge or expertise that simulations have typically been used to develop. Leadership requires flexibility in the application of knowledge developed through simulations and the creation of linkages to behavioral execution skills needed to utilize that knowledge effectively in real world settings.

The successful acquisition of flexible expertise and the related execution skills requires instructional techniques that manage cognitive load, delay automatization of responses, and provide diversity in simulated experiences to ensure richness of the mental models developed while working on simulations. The successful transfer of that knowledge to real world settings requires supplemental instructional techniques that link the use of the mental models developed on simulations to the contexts and behavioral requirements of the trainees' roles in real world settings.

If simulations are going to be used effectively for the development of dynamic skills such as leadership there is a need to go beyond their traditional use. The execution of leadership skills requires flexible expertise. The successful acquisition of rich schemata and versatile mental models as the goal of leadership development programs calls for instructional techniques that also facilitate the successful manifestation of flexible expertise.

The paper shows that, when embedded in deliberative processing, application of knowledge developed though simulations and the creation of linkages to behavioral execution skills facilitates successful performance in complex and dynamic real world challenges.