Reducing Pre-service Teachers’ Public Speaking Anxiety through a Virtual Reality Intervention

It is well documented that teachers experience a plethora of emotions in their work including anxiety. While most research has focused on anxiety in regard to curricular areas, teachers may also experience public speaking anxiety. Unlike curricular anxiety, public speaking anxiety permeates all aspects of a teacher’s work, thereby potentially exerting negative consequences for their own well-being and their students’ learning. This multi-method pre-post single-group pilot study aimed to explore sources of pre-service teachers’ public speaking anxiety and to test the utility of a virtual reality (VR) intervention to reduce public speaking and social appearance anxiety. Participants (n = 7) described three sources of public speaking anxiety: communication difficulties, expectations of others, and judgment of others. Participants delivered three lessons over a period of about 5 weeks to a VR classroom simulated by the Virtual Orator © program. There were 22 student avatars representing various genders and ethnicities. Avatars were programmed to be informal in their actions and generally friendly, but they could not interact with the participant. The results of paired-samples t-tests showed that public speaking and social appearance anxiety were significantly reduced following the VR intervention. Participants described the VR as realistic and useful for real life. We discuss the results from the perspective of the control-value theory of emotions with implications for teacher education programs.