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.







In this sense, the advantages that microteaching has over other
traditional teacher training programs are obvious. These advantages
are summarized as follows:
(a) Microteaching is a training opportunity and the students can
profit from all of the advantages of the situation.
(b) Microteaching provides the student with a much less complex
learning milieu than, e.g., school practice.
(c) It offers the student the opportunity to more easily and
purposefully practice teaching skills during the presentation of
micro-lessons.
(d) It provides the student with a context in which his primary
responsibility is to learn to teach more effectively without the
urgency of taking into account the needs and demands of pupils.
(e) It offers the student the opportunity to systematically analyze
and evaluate his teaching.
(f) It offers the student the opportunity to practice particular
teaching skills until they are mastered before the more complex real
teaching situation is dared.
(g) The systematic practice of teaching skills creates the possibility
of forming a bridge between theory and practice.
(h) Implementing interaction-analysis instruments offers the
opportunity to objectively analyze particular activities and makes
the student sensitive to part-activities that the skill manifests.
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(i) The fact that the micro-lesson takes a short time gives the
student the opportunity to better identify the elements of the
learning contents and then further design his micro-lesson around
them.
(j) The student himself, or under the guidance of a teacher
educator, can easily correct problems or errors that arise because
the variables he has to take into account are limited (a-j: Calitz,
1981: 46).
(k) It gives each student the opportunity to contribute meaningfully
to the improvement of his fellow students and at the same time it
puts a great deal of responsibility on his shoulders.
(l) To present a micro-lesson to fellow students in the same subject
area gives him the opportunity to present his micro-lesson on any
grade level.
(m) It provides the opportunity to students to put themselves, as far
as possible, in the position of the pupils with whom they must try to
deal.
(n) The student who presents the micro-lesson is challenged to
communicate with his "pupils" about the content on an appropriate
learning level even though he presents his micro-lesson to fellow
students.
The greatest value of microteaching is the changes it brings about in
students regarding their teaching. The greatest changes brought
about by microteaching are:
*a greater grasp of teaching as a complex, challenging
profession;
*a greater interest in and enthusiasm for teaching;
*an increased self-confidence;
*a greater concern for improving and evaluating his own
teaching. (Turney, et al, 1973: 8).
9. CONCLUSIONS
As a reduced, simulated, training and practice situation,
microteaching offers outstanding possibilities to fill the gaps in
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traditional teacher education. For microteac