INTRODUCTION
Micro teaching is a teacher education technique which allows
teachers to apply clearly defined teaching skill to carefully prepared lessons
in a planned series of five to ten minutes, encounters with a small group of
five to ten pupils, often within an opportunity to observe the results on
videotape.
Micro teaching is a
system of controlled practice that makes it possible to concentrate on specific
teaching behavior and to practice under controlled conditions (Allen and Eve).A
systematic review of literature reveals that a large number of teaching skills
have been identified by various researchers in India and abroad.
Various
phases involved in a micro teaching activity
Micro teaching is a training technique whereby the teacher reviews a videotape of the lesson after each session, in order to conduct a "post-Morten".
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 their 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.
Micro teaching is a teacher training technique for learning
teaching skills. It employs real teaching situation for developing skills and
helps to get deeper knowledge regarding the art of teaching. This Stanford
technique involved the steps of “plan, teach, observe, re-plan, re-teach
and re-observe” and has evolved as the core component in 91% of on-campus
clinical teaching development programs, with the significant reduction in the
teaching complexities with respect to number of students in a class, scope of
content, and time frame, etc. Most of the pre-service teacher education programs
widely use micro teaching, and it is a proven method to attain gross improvement
in the instructional experiences. Effective student teaching should be the
prime quality of a teacher. As an innovative method of equipping teachers to be
effective, skills and practices of micro teaching have been implemented.
Meaning and Definition
D.W.Allen
(1966): Micro teaching is a scaled down teaching encounter in class size and
time.
L.C.Singh (1977): Micro
teaching is a ‘scaled down teaching encounter’ in which a teacher teaches a
small unit to a group of five pupils for a small period of five to twenty minutes.
Such a situation offers a helpful setting for an experienced or inexperienced
teacher to acquire new teaching skills and refine old ones.
Steps and Requirements of Micro teaching
Knowledge acquisition, skill acquisition, and
transfer are the three different phases of micro teaching .Knowledge acquisition
phase is the preparatory, pre-active phase, in which the teacher gets trained
on the skills and components of teaching through lectures, discussion,
illustration, and demonstration of the skill by the experts. In the interactive,
skill acquisition phase, the teacher plans a micro-lesson for practicing the
demonstrated skills. The colleagues and peers can act as constructive
evaluators which also enable them to modify their own teaching-earning practices.
The teacher can reinforce behaviors and skills that are necessary and
extinguish that are not needed. Ultimately, they can integrate and transfer
this learned skills from simulated teaching situation to real class room
teaching.
After
understanding the concepts and components of each core teaching skill, the
participant should prepare a micro-lesson for each core teaching skill, and
implement one skill in each micro teaching session in a sequential manner. The
setting can be done in the department itself with minimal facilities on a
weekly or monthly basis. Adequate and appropriate constructive feedback for
each skill can encourage re-teaching and re-implementing of the skill. The
feedback data can be reused, and all the core teaching skills can be integrated
in a macro lesson and ultimately to a real classroom teaching or medical
education programs. The entire faculty play dual role of trainee and
constructive evaluators. This also improves the evaluating skills of teacher.
Though there are possible chances of not providing proper feedback during the
initial sessions, the skilled ability to evaluate and provide constructive
feedback increases when there is an increase in the number of sessions.
IMPACT OF MICRO TEACHING
Merits and demerits
Micro teaching has a pivotal role in all medical education training programs and contributes
to a great extent to the better understanding of teaching process and its
complexities. A case study on micro teaching lesson study combining the elements
of Japanese lesson study and micro teaching technique reported that the pre-and
post-lesson plans had successfully demonstrated growth in teachers’ knowledge
on teaching. The “teach, critique, re-teach” model in a dental education
program identified micro teaching as a technique for personality development and
confidence-building of health professionals. Heyroth describes micro teaching as
a “scaled-down teaching encounter designed to develop new skills and refine old
ones.” In spite of experiencing anxiety, micro teaching has evolved as the proven
technique in nurse education. Apart from increasing the teaching performances
of 57 nursing students, the micro teaching had proven to be effective in the
retention of the learned behaviors, even 6 months after course completion.
Dietetic students had reportedly high confidence levels after an intensive
workshop based on micro teaching technique. Another study determined the impact
of a micro teaching experience on development of performance-based skills at a
pharmacy college. A micro teaching activity incorporated within a professional
development seminar series was proved to be an effective method to enhance and
develop communication, problem-solving, and critical-thinking skills in
pharmacy students. Micro teaching helps not only in developing skills of the
novice teachers but also assists in comparing the effectiveness of variation of
one micro teaching with another. Micro teaching has the ability to enhance the
skills of problem solving, critical thinking, questioning, and reflective
thinking. It improves learning by realistic applications. The other key
benefits of this technique included the following: Transformation of difficult
topics into learn able units, usage of advanced organizers, integration of the
lecture with applications on topics, and usage of proper questions and pauses.
The role of health educators can thus be effectively satisfied by practicing micro teaching techniques.
CONCLUSION
Micro teaching works as a focused instrument which helps to practice essential teaching skills
safely and effectively at any age. This paper describes micro teaching as an
Efficient Learning Technique for Effective Teaching. Learning is a change in
behavior, which is brought about by activity, training, or experiencing at any
age. When the learner is more experienced, learning becomes more effective. The
most important quality of the participants of micro teaching sessions is the
ability to give and receive constructive feedback with an open mind and
achieves appropriate teaching-learning goals. In addition, it increases
self-confidence of teacher in an atmosphere of friendliness and equanimity.
TEAM TEACHING
Team teaching provides teacher controlled instructional
experiences to the students. This is an instructional procedure used by many
teachers to improve teaching-learning process in the classroom. Team teaching
is an innovation in teaching in which two or more teachers plan, executive and evaluates
the learning experiences of a group of students.
Meaning
and Definitions
R.A.Singer (1964):
Team Teaching may be defined “as an arrangement whereby two or more teachers
cooperatively plan, teach and evaluate one or more class groups in an
appropriate and agreed teaching plan and is given length of time so as to take
advantage of specific competencies of the team members”.
“Team teaching is a form of learning
organization in which the individual teachers decide to pool resources,
interests and expertise in order to device and implement a scheme of work
suitable to the needs of their students and the facilities of the institution”(Warwick).
Team teaching involves a group of persons, or a team, instead of
an individual, in the instructional process .A ‘team’ is not just a collection
of individuals, but, a unit in itself making effort to improve instruction
through the reorganization of personnel in teaching. In other words, two or
more teachers are given responsibilities to work together for the instruction
of a particular group of students attempting a particular course.
Objectives of team teaching
1.
To identify better talents
of teachers and utilize them for the teaching of a certain course.
2.
To improve the quality of
instruction .Two heads are better than one because many brains are better than
one.
3.
To make best utilization
of the talents, interests, and expertise of the teachers.
4.
To provide better
organization of the teaching –learning by increasing grouping and scheduled
flexibility.
5.
To provide opportunity to
a specific large or small group of students to take advantage of the
specifically talented, experienced and more expert teacher, otherwise not
available to them.
6.
To meet the needs and
interests of the students and institutions and removing their difficulties
relating to the teaching-learning of some specific contents or act ivies.
7.
To minimize the wastage
and errors occurred in the instructional process.
Types of Team
Teaching
1. Single
disciplinary team teaching
In this type
the members of the team belong to the same institution and also from the same
discipline or subject.
2. Interdisciplinary
team teaching
Here the
teachers from different disciplines, but working in the same institution, join
hands to take responsibility of teaching the topics belonging to their own
discipline.
3. Inter-institutional
team teaching
In this type of
team teaching, the members are not confined to the same institution .Here; we
can call the services of any talented teacher, expert, etc. from any
institution/public life for dealing with some or the other specialized field,
topic, work activity, content material, etc.
STYLES OF TEACHING
There are mainly four
styles of team teaching. They are:
1. Team teaching in the same period:
In this style, the
learn members; discuss the various aspects of the same topic in the same class
period. This may bring about the interrelatedness of knowledge through
discussions by different teachers from different subjects.
2. Specialization based team teaching
In this style, team
members, with different subject specializations are responsible for all
activities of instruction starting from course formulation to evaluation. The
course units can be shared by members of the team, depending upon their
interests and abilities. The basic motive behind this technique is to make the
best utilization of the available human resources, in terms of subject
specialization.
3. Ability based team teaching
In this
style, a team is responsible for all the instructional activities. The sharing
of units is not done according to subject specialization, but according to the
abilities and skills involved in activities like lecturing, conducting
seminars, guiding discussions and giving demonstrations which are required on
the part of the teachers. Here different abilities can be maximally utilized.
4. Relay style of Team teaching
In this approach, a teacher is followed by another teacher he
completes teaching of a unit. In this process, two or three teachers are
involved in the teaching of a particular course. Here the division of work is
neither according to the abilities of the members of the team. This approach
may not at first glance, appear to have an instruction value, but the worth of
it lies in the fact and it can be easily adopted as a beginning institutions
where team teaching is not in practice.
REFERENCES
1. 1. Mathew
T.K & Pramod Thomas George (2012).Modern trends in educational practices,
Rainbow book publishers: India.
2. 2. Mangal
S.K.&Uma Man gal (2008).Essentials of Educational Technology, PHI learning
pvt. limited: New Delhi
