The Experience of my Micro Teaching

Over the past several decades, various activities and strategies have been implemented into Teacher Education methods courses in an attempt to increase the effectiveness of the courses, as well as the education programs overall. While some may have come and gone, incorporating microteaching experiences into pre-service teacher education programs is still alive and strong in the 21st Century.

As Allen and Ryan (1969:1) stated, microteaching is "a training concept that can be applied at various pre-service and in-service stages in the professional development of teachers." It provides teachers with opportunities to practice in an instructional setting in which the normal complexities of the classroom are limited and in which they can receive feedback on their performances. As universities continued the implementation, a number of studies were conducted that provided evidence that microteaching is an effective means of improving pre-service teachers' teaching skills (Borg, Kallenbach, Morris, & Friebel, 1969: Davis & Smoot, 1970: McDonald & Allen, 1967; Morse & Davis, 1970; Yeany, 1978).

The Benefit of Micro Teaching

Benefits of microteaching

Letters | Published in TESS on 1 May, 2009 | By: Gordon For

Having read your report on microteaching at Stirling University, I can happily confirm that it was indeed very much alive from 1970 when I first experienced it under Jack Duthie. I am surprised that the university doesn’t know how successful it was then. Students were introduced to the Flanders Interaction Analysis Chart which allowed observers to check pupil/teacher interaction. It was very useful. The benefit of microteaching at that time was that it quickly identified those students who simply did not have the personality to help children enjoy learning and, hopefully, led to students unsuited to teaching to withdraw.
Gordon Ford, director of education, West Lothian Council.
ADVANTAGES OF MICROTEACHING
Microteaching manifests itself in this chapter as:
*a reduced situation;
*a training and practice situation;
*a simulated situation.

Micro Teacing Macro

Microteaching is a training technique whereby the teacher reviews a videotape of the lesson after each session, in order to conduct a "post-mortem". Teachers find out what has worked, which aspects have fallen short, and what needs to be done to enhance their teaching technique. Invented in the mid-1960s at Stanford University by Dr. Dwight Allen, micro-teaching has been used with success for several decades now, as a way to help teachers acquire new skills.

In the original process, a teacher was asked to prepare a short lesson (usually 20 minutes) for a small group of learners who may not have been her own students. This was videotaped, using VHS. After the lesson, the teacher, teaching colleagues, a master teacher and the students together viewed the videotape and commented on what they saw happening, referencing the teacher's learning objectives. Seeing the video and getting comments from colleagues and students provided teachers with an often intense "under the microscope" view of their teaching.

Micro lessons are great opportunities to present sample "snapshots" of what/how you teach and to get some feedback from colleagues about how it was received. It's a chance to try teaching strategies that the teacher may not use regularly. It's a good, safe time to experiment with something new and get feedback on technique.