Abstract
Throughout the last decades, understanding and defining the process of globalization challenges educators as of the variety factors that dynamic changes in the world. While focusing on education, it is absolutely clear that immigration influences all related areas; from the variety of languages that are spoken in schools, through the variety of cultures students are coming from, and the need to teach specific domains that will relate to all. Whereas quality assurance in education is another domain researchers and educators deal with, the mentioned factors must be carefully considered already during teacher-training programs. Although it was always a challenge to train teachers for quality teaching process without knowing who their students will be, this challenge is much more complicated in our era. Nowadays, educational leaders need to train teachers to teach efficiency in dynamic areas when they cannot predict who their students will be, what their native language will be, from which culture they will come, and what other diverse characteristics will be part of the teaching as well. The main question that gathers all the above questions is: how can we train quality teachers that develop necessary teaching skills, without knowing exactly the culture of school they will be teaching at?
As part of the process of developing new teacher-training programs that will promote quality teachers that will be skilled to deal with the dynamically changing society, one of the training methods that currently is integrated through academic teacher-training programs is the simulation-based training (SBL). Simulations in general, provide a type of framework in which cognitive knowledge can be translated into performance. The participants experience controversial situations in a safe environment, in which they can learn their strengths and weaknesses in a variety of situations that are pre-planned by professionals (Rooney, Hopwood, Boud and Kelly, 2015). Following the basic methods of simulation, while practicing SBL in teacher training processes, all simulations present a realistic scenario, to which hired professional actors react dynamically. As of the fact the simulations are video-recorded, after participating in a simulation, the scene can be analyzed; this includes the self-observations of the student experiencing the scenario, as well as a reflective discussion (Rudolph, Simon, Dufresne and Raemer, 2006). Following the challenge to prepare quality teachers who have the knowledge and the skills to cope with variety of students, the simulations are prepared accordingly and the topic of differential teaching methods among students from different background is dealt as well (Nakayama, Arakawa, Ejiri, Matsuda & Makino, 2018).
Educational leaders, who wish to prepare teachers to unfamiliar educational situations in schools, accepted the approach of the SBL as an essential part of teacher-training programs. The motivation to use SBL and to change the existing teacher training programs accordingly derive from the understanding that this type of learning hones the skills that lead to effective communication, based on trust and respect (Eizenhamer, et al., 2010). Moreover, the SBL approach imbues participants with a sense of confidence in the learning-teaching processes and promotes the acquisition of skills related to emotional intelligence, as well as social and academic skills (Shapira-Lishchinsky, Glanz and Shaer, 2016).
From understanding the advantages SBL has, this study was developed in order to learn how teacher-trainees use the SBL in order to improve their teaching skills, gaining confidence to deal with the variety of situations in school (Teräs and Kartoğlu, 2017), and becoming increasing their quality of teaching within a dynamic changing environment.