Seeking to support preservice teachers' responsive teaching: Leveraging artificial intelligence‐supported virtual simulation

Preparing preservice teachers (PSTs) to be able to notice, interpret, respond to and orchestrate student ideas—the core practices of responsive teaching—is a key goal for contemporary science and mathematics teacher education. This mixed‐methods study, employing a virtual reality (VR)‐supported simulation integrated with artificial intelligence (AI)‐powered virtual students, explored the frequent patterns of PSTs' talk moves as they attempted to orchestrate a responsive discussion, as well as the affordances and challenges of leveraging AI‐supported virtual simulation to enhance PSTs' responsive teaching skills. Sequential analysis of the talk moves of both PSTs (n = 24) and virtual students indicated that although PSTs did employ responsive talk moves, they encountered difficulties in transitioning from the authoritative, teacher‐centred teaching approach to a responsive way of teaching. The qualitative analysis with triangulated dialogue transcripts, observational field notes and semi‐structured interviews revealed participants' engagement in (1) orchestrating discussion by leveraging the design features of AI‐supported simulation, (2) iterative rehearsals through naturalistic and contextualized interactions and (3) exploring realism and boundaries in AI‐powered virtual students. The study findings provide insights into the potential of leveraging AI‐supported virtual simulation to improve PSTs' responsive teaching skills. The study also underscores the need for PSTs to engage in well‐designed pedagogical practices with adaptive and in situ support.Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Developing the teaching capacity of responsive teaching is an important goal for preservice teacher (PST) education. PSTs need systematic opportunities to build fluency in this approach. Virtual simulations can provide PSTs with the opportunities to practice interactive teaching and have been shown to improve their teaching skills. Artificial intelligence (AI)‐powered virtual students can be integrated into virtual simulations to enable interactive and authentic practice of teaching. What this paper adds AI‐supported simulation has the potential to support PSTs' responsive teaching skills. While PSTs enact responsive teaching talk moves, they struggle to enact those talk moves in challenging teaching scenarios due to limited epistemic and pedagogical resources. AI‐supported simulation affords iterative and contextualized opportunities for PSTs to practice responsive teaching talk moves; it challenges teachers to analyse student discourse and respond in real time. Implications for practice and/or policy PSTs should build a teaching repertoire with both basic and advanced responsive talk moves. The learning module should adapt to PSTs' prior experience and provide PSTs with in situ learning support to navigate challenging teaching scenarios. Integrating interaction features and AI‐based virtual students into the simulation can facilitate PSTs' active participation.