The Experience of Micro Teaching In The Class

1. The labs allowed me to assess my instructional strengths and weaknesses.

"I feel that I was able to identify my strengths and weaknesses 

and now I can work with them."

  "Microteaching was a very beneficial tool, in the sense that

it has developed my confidence as well as focused on areas 

that need improvement."

   "I learned so much about my weaknesses and strengths, personal 

teaching
   attributes and new skills to employ when I enter the real world."

2. The labs increased and/or developed my public presentation/communication skills.

"The experience showed me how to present what I know to the 

best of my ability."

   "This experience has made my anxiety of public speaking almost
   nonexistent."

   "I saw these microteaching experiences as excellent opportunities 

for me to test my communication and teaching skills as well as 

learn some new `tricks of the trade'."

The Benefit of Micro Teaching Learning

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.
 

Definition of Micro Teaching

 Microteaching is a scaled-down, simulated teaching encounter designed for the training of both preservice or in-service teachers. It has been used worldwide since its invention at Stanford University in the late 1950s by Dwight W. Allen, Robert Bush, and Kim Romney. Its purpose is to provide teachers with the opportunity for the safe practice of an enlarged cluster of teaching skills while learning how to develop simple, single-concept lessons in any teaching subject. Microteaching helps teachers improve both content and methods of teaching and develop specific teaching skills such as questioning, the use of examples and simple artifacts to make lessons more interesting, effective reinforcement techniques, and introducing and closing lessons effectively. Immediate, focused feedback and encouragement, combined with the opportunity to practice the suggested improvements in the same training session, are the foundations of the microteaching protocol.

Over the years microteaching has taken many forms. Its early configurations were very formal and complex. Real students (typically four or five) were placed in a rotation of teaching stations in a microteaching clinic. Teachers would teach an initial five to ten minute, single element lesson that was critiqued by a supervisor. The teacher would have a brief time to revise the lesson and then reteach the same lesson to a different group. In later years these sessions were videotaped. Videotaping microteaching lessons became the optimal practice because it allowed teachers to view their own performance.
Microteaching soon spread to more than half of the teacher preparation programs in the United States, and to other parts of the world. Though successful, its complexity overwhelmed its effectiveness as a training device and its use declined over the following decades.