Revolutionizing Teacher Preparation with AI Classrooms With Aurora University with
What if future teachers could step into a classroom before ever setting foot in one—and gain real, hands-on experience with AI-driven students?
In this inspiring episode of the VictoryXR Show, host Steve Grubbs sits down with Dr. Susana Rivera-Mills, President of Aurora University, and Aubrey Brammar Southall, the visionary educator behind a first-of-its-kind teacher training simulation.
Together, they explore how Aurora University is using AI avatars and immersive learning to redefine teacher preparation and strengthen the education pipeline. Here’s a transcription of the full episode:
Steve Grubbs
Welcome, everybody. I am Steve Grubbs. I am the CEO, co-founder of Victory XR. And we have two amazing guests here today that I am very excited about because they came up with just this really innovative, groundbreaking idea in the world of educating teachers. And so I want to introduce to you Dr. Susanna Rivera-Mills. She is the president of Aurora University and Aubrey Brammar Southall, who is the one who really came up with this idea. And so I’m gonna get to them in a minute, but before we start, I’m going to try to share my screen and show you a video that talks about this product so you have a visual in your head. So here we go. Alright, playing my screen. And… *Steve plays video*
Steve Grubbs
So I’m going to start with Aubrey and then go to Susanna. And Aubrey, what did we just see there? What’s the bottom line of this simulation?
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
So what’s really cool about the simulation is teacher candidates can select to teach grades 6 through 12 and then a variety of subject areas in science, social studies, English and mathematics and foreign language. And students get the opportunity or teacher candidates get the opportunity to practice teaching with their avatars and getting feedback on questioning, real-world connections, and really just responding to the information and connecting it to the students. So it’s a great practice round to enhance their teaching when they go into the field, into our local schools.
Steve Grubbs
What is really interesting from my point of view as the CEO of the company is before you came to us with this concept, we’d had this idea of doing multiple AIs in one experience. But for the most part, if you walk into like our cadaver lab or dissection or whatever, there’s one AI and you have a conversation with that solo AI. And it’s great because it’s an instructor, whatever. But you pushed us to figure out how does it work if you have an entire classroom of AI students, each with their own personality, their own quirks, their own avatars. And yet it still has to work seamlessly. The AIs can’t get confused at who’s talking and that type of thing. And so the technology was not easy. It was hard. Were you happy with the way that piece of it came out?
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
Yeah, it was really great. I worked with Chris and David pretty closely throughout seeing renditions of the avatars we’re creating. They were really great at responding to my calls to make the avatars more diverse and to represent the larger student population in the United States. But it was really fun to go through. And then Kathleen was really great at making sure that our students had different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and neuro backgrounds. And that way it wasn’t stereotypical of children. So it was real life case three. So it’s fun to, see the different perks and quirks of the students and how they chat and how they talk and which ones want to answer questions and things of that nature.
Steve Grubbs
Yeah, it’s amazing. Kathleen being, for those of you who may not know, our curriculum director within VictoryXR and then David being the lead developer on the project. Susanna, the College of Education at Aurora University is a big deal, and you have a very specific mission or vision for it. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and then also how something like this fits into your vision?
Dr. Susana Rivera-Mills
Absolutely. You know, education is one of our largest majors here at the university. And what I love about our college that I think is really important is the way that we have partnered with our school districts. We partner with teachers. We partner with the superintendents. We listen to them very intentionally. We hear what are the needs? What are the challenges? And then our faculty does a wonderful job of gaining that feedback and ensuring that our curriculum is adaptable, it’s nimble, it’s evolving, it’s always improving, and that we’re responding to those needs that we’re hearing. from our teachers, from our superintendents, feedback from our students, our graduates that are then placed into those schools, into those districts. And so I think it’s that partnership, that listening, that conversation that is ongoing, that is so critical to ensure that we are always on the leading edge and that we are ensuring that our student experience is such that not just prepares our students for careers in education, but actually makes them feel prepared. And so one of the things I appreciate about what we have done with Victory EXR is that this simulation really enhances that student experience for us because our students are able to explore, to test out what does it feel like, get a sense, right, of what it feels like to be in front of a classroom to teach. And I can tell you, I spent 12 years doing teacher training, and one of the most heartbreaking things for me was whenever I had a student who was in their last semester, getting ready to graduate, doing that student teaching experience, and I was out there supervising, And it would take them that long to figure out whether teaching was really for them or not. And so I think what we have begun to create here together is an opportunity for our students to answer that question for themselves much sooner. And for our teachers and our advisors and our mentors to then support them in thinking differently about that experience.
Steve Grubbs
So my father was a public school teacher. He was also the football coach and sort of this Clint Eastwood guy. And he was a good teacher. But the thing, and it was a tougher school. It was a lower socioeconomic school. But he was able to maintain order in class and was able to do a really good job of engaging students in conversation. So I’ve seen, and I had him as a student one year, just the computer plopped me into his class. So I’ve seen how it works well, but I obviously, and we all had, we had teachers who really struggled to maintain their classes and to get the most out of their students. So you started alluding to it, but Suzanne, I’d love it if you went a little bit deeper. What problem are we solving with this AI solution?
Dr. Susana Rivera-Mills
One is teacher confidence, right? Helping students be able to take risks in a safe environment and developing their confidence through potential mistakes that they might make. And so the second thing is then that leads to a readiness that helps them to start further down the line than what a new teacher would have to face. in the classroom for the first time. And the more we do this, the more we can put teachers that are prepared out there. And frankly, the large picture then is you also prevent teacher shortage because there’s less issues around retaining burnout. Teachers already know what they’re getting into by the time they are placed in that area.
Steve Grubbs
So would this analogy be a good one? I fly a lot, literally every week I’m flying. And I have this level of comfort that my pilot has first completed the simulation for edge cases, right? Like landing a plane in the Potomac River. And then they get behind the real plane and they figure out how to do that. But they don’t get to land a plane in the Potomac River in the real world. They do that in the simulator. So I have that sense of comfort knowing that this occurred. And I was sort of thinking it’s a little bit the same here. How would you respond to that analogy?
Dr. Susana Rivera-Mills
I think, yes. So that’s one side of the coin, right? That you as a customer would feel a level of comfort in the fact that you have a pilot that has been very well trained and has had multiple experiences in different contexts to be able to then fly your plane. On the other side of the coin is the pilot himself or herself, right? They have a level of confidence that, And sometimes half the battle is to feel confident in what you’re about to do and to be able to portray that confidence as you, in your case, as the pilot walks into the plane, you don’t want to see a pilot that’s nervous and insecure and not too sure of which lever is which, right? I think in the same way, our students, our principals, our families, can feel that confidence from a student who can walk into the classroom and actually have the presence and exude the confidence of knowing that I’ve been here before, I know what this feels like, I know what tools are available to me and be able to then deliver that teaching and learning experience that we all want them to be successful at.
Steve Grubbs
Aubrey, one of the things that was really interesting to me that I was surprised it worked as well as it did was the AI feedback on my teaching. Can you talk a little bit about what you were trying to accomplish with that? and how the AI does, and then what is the role of a college instructor who’s assigning this to their students?
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
So when I was working with David, I wanted to make sure that we were able to give feedback on requirements of the state of Illinois for teacher education, but then also requirements of Aurora University School of Education. So we’re a relationship intensive institution. And one of the things I really stress in all of my classes is that my students are making connections with their students. They’re taking the real world and they’re bringing that into their classroom. We do that by visiting downtown Aurora and finding information that we can bring in.
So I was able to work with David that the students can get feedback on how well they’re connecting the subject to the students in the room and how well they’re taking, not that they know physics or chemistry or geometry, oral history, but they know how to relate it to the sixth through 12th graders that they’re working with. Because for me, that’s the most important.
And it also teaches students to look for their content everywhere and the purpose of schooling. So I always try to stress that the content is a vehicle that we use to teach a variety of things with our students. And we’re preparing students as teachers that we want to live with in society. And we want them to see why this is important and why it relates.
So it was really fun for me to work with David to take requirement to the State Board of Ed that we use kind of as our springboard. And then we go above that with relationship intensive practices within teacher education and then able to get feedback on that. So the students get a formal feedback and then there’s an informal one, which I like, and they’re able to save that and read it.
It can be shared with me or not. Our students are able to check the headsets out and work on this on their own at home or do it for an in-class assignment. So I like that it gives them the different levels of feedback so that they can prepare for their actual classrooms and working with those students face to face.
Steve Grubbs
So, you know, we build a lot of simulations for a lot of universities and colleges, you know, from all over, from Seton Hall to New Mexico State to West Virginia, et cetera, et cetera. But this is really one of the best use cases I have ever seen. How did you come up with this idea?
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
Well, we had an Aurora University innovation grant and I was, you know, I had talked to several people and my role is really unique at the university because my students are actually students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, you know, Health and Science. There are a variety of majors and I work with all the deans on campus.
And so when I was brainstorming with them, I was trying to think about a way, you know, my students could be better prepared for the field. And I started searching for options once we got these close to 300 headsets. How can I use these and how can I use these to better equip my students?
We actually have a growing education department, very different from the US norm right now. So our secondary ed program specifically has quadrupled over the last decade. And I still want to give really personal feedback to all of my students. So I was also searching for a way with these really growing classes to still have this very unique experience.
So I started searching. I met with a lot of different companies, and they just did not have what I was looking for. I reached out. Dr. Patel and Dr. Carter run our innovation grant. And I said, is this something that we could design? And so they set up a meeting for me to meet with Chris and David. And I kind of talked through what our budget was and what I was really looking for.
And they seemed really excited. And I was excited to bring this on. I was just talking to Susana earlier today. I’ve been taking the headset around to different conferences and so many people are, you know, for lack of a better word, jealous, because it’s the only program like this right now. There are ones that you have to upload your lesson plan days in advance that the avatars are actually puppeted by humans, but this is the only AI generated one right now.
And so I think it’s really unique for our college to have this cutting edge technology and for our students to do so. And I love that it gives different, they can, the teachers can walk around and work with the students individually, and they can stand up at the front of the room and teach. So I think it’s gonna be really great for our students. It just launched at the beginning of the month and I’ve already had so much wonderful feedback from our student population.
Dr. Susana Rivera-Mills
And Steve, can I interject? I have to tell you, this was wonderful. When Aubrey came to talk to me earlier today, she brought the headset. And I actually had an opportunity to teach a Spanish class using a headset. So I got to experience hands-on, right, what this feels like, what it looks like when you’re in it. And it was really remarkable.
And as wonderful as this has been, you know, one of the things that we discussed that I think is really important for people to know is that this is not intended to replace or substitute student teaching, right, or to replace and substitute part of that developmental process to becoming a teacher, but it does enhance it so much.
So sometimes I think when we bring AI to an institution, people become a bit concerned that is this going to replace the professor? Is this going to replace this key experience in our way of teaching and learning. And it really doesn’t. As close and as nice as it is to have the simulation, there are areas where you absolutely still need that human element to help the student think through and reflect through their experience.
So I think it’s that partnership, that complimentary way of working with this technology into the curriculum that makes it so valuable.
Steve Grubbs
Yeah, I have so many questions and we have a limited amount of time, but let me ask this. Let’s say that a school from Texas wanted to utilize the product. Does it need some customization with Texas laws or could they use it out of the box with Illinois standards?
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
I would say, well, Illinois, the state board of ed for a long time has been seen as one of the top state board of eds as far as with licensure recognition. So students who get licensed in the state of Illinois can get licensed in any other state. The retroprosity is high.
So I do feel like taking a state with that type of retroprosity agreements with almost every state in our nation that makes it helpful instead of you have some states transferring licensure requires some additional tests, some additional coursework. So that is something that others could use.
We don’t have specific standards for the State Board of Illinois. We do have prescribed standards that the students are learning, but it’s a lot more open ended. So we did focus on national standards. We have students from all over the country and North America in my classes right now.
I was just talking about that this morning. I have so many different students represented and they will go on to teach in states like Washington, California. They will go back to teach in New York or Florida or Texas, Colorado. Some will go back to the provinces in Canada and different cities and states in Mexico. And I think they’ll be prepared with the program.
So I do see others being able to benefit from something similar just because I see our graduates thriving all over the country when they leave.
Steve Grubbs
So I want to get to Susana on that Spanish class you taught, but then I don’t want to forget to come back to you and ask about the specific on the ground implementation. How does that actually work? So Susana, when you taught your Spanish class, you were speaking in Spanish. Were the students responding in English or Spanish?
Dr. Susana Rivera-Mills
So they were responding in English and Spanish, depending on what my instructions were, right? If I had asked them to repeat something, they would do it in Spanish. If they had a question about the grammar or the use, they would ask in English. So really the class went back and forth in both languages. And it was really fascinating to see how well that worked. You know, it wasn’t distracting. They understood what I was saying. I understood what they were telling me. And so that was pretty critical because that’s what you would expect in a regular class.
Steve Grubbs
Yeah, you’re teaching me something right now. I know that we have really robust translation tools built in, but when you’re pragmatically applying it in a situation like this, does it really work? So I’m glad to hear that.
I know I said one question, but I have two questions, Aubrey. I’m teaching a class. Let’s say I want to just stand up and start teaching a class about Iowa history. Does that work?
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
Yes. So when I worked with the developers, one of the things I wanted to, the students can implement a slide deck or a PowerPoint, PDF, whatever they would like into the program and teach that. But they can also just put the headset on and teach. And the avatars take on whatever you are talking about. So like traditional middle and high schoolers, you can go off on long tangents if they start asking you about questions.
And so there is a part where the teachers are supposed to redirect them back, but they are typical students. So one of my students said I was teaching about the Industrial Revolution and somehow I ended up talking about the United Nations. And I wanted to go back through and look at like how the students got her there with that teaching simulation.
Because when I talked to David, I wanted them to be real high schoolers or real middle schoolers and so that is something that we work on a lot with it’s great to go off and like include these stories but then how are we getting back to the content of the day so I believe that you could put that on i’m actually going to have some of my students test because the amateurs do speak spanish teaching their subjects bilingually so over half of my students are going to graduate and teach their content bilingually or have the option to do so.
We have several partner districts that hire teachers in the high school level and middle school level to teach bilingual biology, bilingual chemistry, bilingual physics, mathematics, history. And one of the students, sometimes they tell me they’re unable to practice that at a placement because the class might, some schools only have bilingual courses in the high school in English. And so then when they get to the school, they haven’t learned their content physics in Spanish.
They’ve learned it in English and they want to go back. They want to be able to practice that. And we have a lot of really great mentors in the community that work with the students on that and a lot of great bilingual faculty that also work on that. But I know the students are really excited.
For example, one of my bilingual chemistry students was really excited to try that out. We also had the teacher of the year on campus. He’s a bilingual chemistry teacher and he tried it out and he loved the idea that you could practice because he said the same thing. He never taught bilingual chemistry until he was in front of a classroom. I mean, he never had the chance to practice taking what he had learned and then taking it to Spanish. So he was really impressed.
And I know our students are really excited just to test out doing a lot of different things, like Susana said, risk taking, but in a safe environment.
Steve Grubbs
That’s awesome. Alright, so I said I wanted to come back and talk about the actual implementation. So if I’m a professor and I’m teaching a class on, say, classroom management or instructional practice — how do I assign this? What do the students actually do?
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
So the students are able to check out a headset from the library or the School of Education, depending on where they’re located. They can sign it out just like they would sign out a book. We also have the option where if they have their own headset, they can log into the system from their own home.
Once they log in, they select the grade band — so grades 6 through 12 — and then they pick the content area. Then they choose the scenario they want to practice. For example, they can choose “questioning strategies,” “real-world connections,” “classroom management,” or “giving feedback.”
They go into the simulation, they teach for a few minutes, and then when they’re finished, they get immediate feedback from the AI. They can also save that feedback and send it to me if they’d like me to review it or add additional notes.
Some professors are having their students do this as a pre-assignment before they go into their field placements, while others are using it mid-semester as part of a reflection on their own teaching growth.
The really nice thing is that it’s flexible — so students can do it during class, at home, or even at night. I have several students who work full-time and they can put on the headset at 9:00 p.m. and still get that teaching practice in.
Steve Grubbs
Yeah, that’s one of the things that makes it scalable, right? It doesn’t have to happen only when the professor is in the room.
I also saw that this project was nominated for an award — can you tell us about that?
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
Yes! So we were nominated for the Innovation in Teacher Preparation Award through the Illinois Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. The award recognizes programs that are using technology or innovative approaches to better prepare educators for diverse classrooms.
It was really exciting because the committee was very interested in how this kind of simulation not only builds confidence but also addresses the teacher shortage by helping candidates persist and stay in the profession.
Even just being nominated felt like a huge honor for us because it shows that people are recognizing the importance of merging technology and authentic teaching practice.
Dr. Susana Rivera-Mills
And I think that’s what makes me so proud of this work. It’s a wonderful example of how innovation should happen in higher education.
It started with an idea — a spark — from a faculty member who said, “We can do this differently, and we can do it better.” And then the institution supported that innovation through the grant process, and through partnerships like this one with VictoryXR.
Now, we’re seeing the real impact: our students are more confident, they’re better prepared, and they’re entering classrooms with experience that goes far beyond what was previously possible.
And that, to me, is exactly what higher education should be doing — helping students succeed, but also helping transform how we think about teaching and learning.
Steve Grubbs
That’s beautifully said. And I think that’s the perfect way to end.
I want to thank both of you — Aubrey, for dreaming this up and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI, and Susana, for having the vision to support innovation on your campus.
I’m really proud that VictoryXR got to be a small part of it. I think what you’re doing here is going to shape the future of teacher preparation in a really profound way.
Thank you both so much for being here.
Dr. Aubrey Brammar Southall
Thank you so much for having us.
Dr. Susana Rivera-Mills
Thank you, Steve. It’s been a pleasure.