Master the Essentials of Micro Teaching: Pedagogy of English, #3

By Dr. Jayanthi N.L.N.

This book aims to enhance and enrich the teaching skills of teachers.

This book is a guide for teachers who want to improve their teaching skills through microteaching, a technique that simplifies and simulates normal classroom teaching in a controlled way. 

It helps teachers to gain real-time teaching experience and excel in their career.  It explains the fundamental concepts, phases, implementation, and impact of microteaching on education.

It also delves into the essential components of microteaching skills, such as introducing the lesson, structuring classroom questions, delivering and distributing questions, reinforcing, probing questions, illustrating with examples, stimulus variation, and explaining skills, and strategies to master them for effective classroom teaching. 

The emerging changes in the curricula by the global educational councils envisage the need for this special training for teachers and monitoring their skills. The impact of this technique has been widely seen in various fields of education such as health sciences, life sciences, engineering, and other areas.

With the proven success among the novice and professionals, microteaching helps to promote real-time teaching experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. Jayanthi N.L.N.
• Release date: Jan 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224379422

Book preview

MICROTEACHING

INTRODUCTION

Teaching skills are the expertise and personal qualities that a teacher needs to possess to thrive while educating students. The meaning of teaching skills is the ability to use various methods, approaches, and strategies to facilitate learning and to achieve the desired learning outcomes.

Teaching skills also involve the understanding of the pedagogical theory, which is the philosophical, sociological, and psychological basis of teaching practices. Teaching skills also include the professional skills, which are the techniques and approaches that help teachers to work with people in a way that helps them to grow in the profession.

The need for teaching skills is evident in the current educational scenario, where teachers are expected to cater to the diverse needs and interests of the students, to cope with the challenges and changes in the curriculum and technology, and to maintain high standards of quality and accountability.

Teaching skills help teachers to become more effective, efficient, and adaptable in their teaching roles, and to enhance their personal and professional growth. Teaching skills also help teachers to create a positive and conducive learning environment for the students, where they can develop their cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains.

CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE TEACHING

Effective teaching is the ability to communicate, motivate, plan, involve, focus, respect, empathize, adapt, value, exchange and inspire. Some of the characteristics of effective teaching are:

Strong communication skills: An effective teacher can communicate clearly and confidently with the students, and use a variety of methods and media to convey the content and objectives of the lesson.

Self-motivation for learning: An effective teacher is passionate about their subject and their profession, and seeks to improve their knowledge and skills through continuous learning and reflection.

Effective planning: An effective teacher designs and delivers well-organized and coherent lessons that align with the curriculum standards and the students' needs and interests.

Active student involvement: An effective teacher engages the students in the learning process, and encourages them to think critically, creatively and collaboratively.

Focus on selected information: An effective teacher prioritizes the most essential and relevant information for the students, and helps them to connect the new knowledge with their prior learning and experience.

Democratic ideals: An effective teacher respects and values the diversity and individuality of the students, and fosters a culture of mutual respect, trust and cooperation in the classroom.

Empathy and patience: An effective teacher understands and cares about the students' personal and academic problems, and shows patience and compassion when dealing with them.

Adaptability: An effective teacher can adapt to different situations, contexts and learners, and modify their teaching strategies and methods accordingly.

Value in real-world learning: An effective teacher connects the academic content to the real-world applications and experiences of the students, and helps them develop relevant skills and competencies for life and work.

Exchange of best practices: An effective teacher collaborates with other teachers and professionals, and shares and learns from their best practices and experiences.

Lifelong love of learning: An effective teacher demonstrates a love of learning, and inspires the students to become lifelong learners themselves.

MICROTEACHING

The art of teaching does not merely involve a simple transfer of knowledge from one to other. Instead, it is a complex process that facilitates and influences the process of learning. Quality of a teacher is estimated on how much the students understand from his/her teaching. The classrooms cannot be used as a learning platform for acquiring primary teaching skills. The pedagogic skill for teaching can be acquired only through more structured and economical faculty training techniques. (Foley RP) With the introduction of microteaching about five decades ago, the lacunae of scientifically proven or effective methods to be followed in teacher training programs has been overcome. (Elliot. J)

The aim of this chapter is to emphasize the need for using microteaching techniques more frequently and efficiently with minimum available facilities. A systematic literature search of research articles and reviews was undertaken from various educational databases. From the reference lists of published articles, books available were also reviewed.

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS ON TEACHING SKILLS

Several innovations like sensitivity training, human relations training, behaviour modification approach, simulation, interaction analysis, and microteaching have been tried out by Flanders (1970), and Jangira (1979), for Interaction Analysis, Taylor and Walford (1972) for simulation; and Patterson (1971).

Micro-teaching is training setting for the student teachers to where complexities of the normal classroom teaching are reduced. Micro-teaching was developed in the Centre of Research and Development at Stanford in 1960's. For its developmental history of the microteaching abroad, is that it is a technique based on high technology involving the sophisticated gadgets like Video Tape-recorder, Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), for modelling the behaviour of the student teacher in the use of a particular providing feedback on his teaching performance.

The most important aspect to be noted down is that microteaching is based on the premise that the complex teaching act can be analysed into simple teaching skills. Hence, this chapter provides you the knowledge about the concept, identification, and selection of the component teaching skills for training.

Teaching has been the subject of study since long due to the growing concern about its effectiveness. Many educators have analysed teaching in several ways with a view to understanding it, and designing instructional methods, and materials for realizing the specific objectives. Teaching can be analysed in terms of teacher behaviour at least at three levels viz., component teaching skills, component teaching behaviours, and atomistic teaching behaviours.

Many significant contributions on teacher effectiveness or the theories of learning and instruction have been made by - Gage (1963, 1965), Rosenshein (1971, 1972, 19780, Medley (1978), Flanders (1969, 1970), Travers (1973), Dunkin and Bridle (1974), Buch (1975,1979), and Jangira (1971, 1974, 1979, and 1980), and Dave (1978) and DTE (1980),Allen and Ryan (1969), Borg (1970), Flanders (1973), Turney (1973), and Brown (1975) .

Based on the research studies on teacher effectiveness referred above, analysis of teaching several sets of component teaching skills have been identified by different institutions and individual researchers in different countries. A number of these skills are common with different terminology and minor differences in the component teaching behaviours comprising skills.

It is to be noted that the number of skills varies from source to source. This may be due to the fact that the number of skills and the level of their specification have been determined by a number of considerations such as the commitment of the teacher educators in the light of teaching effectiveness and the level of trainees. However, one thing is obvious that the common denominator in the skills is very high. The skills are similar with different terminology. Some skills have been further broken down into similar skills for convenience of training.

CONTRIBUTION OF ALLEN AND RYAN

The limitations of conventional system of teacher training are due to considering the teaching skills as a very simple one. But careful analysis will reveal that teaching is not simple task. It is a complex skill consisting of several sub-skills. Several research studies, classroom interaction analysis and various theories of teaching have helped to identify the sub-skills of teaching. Allen and Ryan at the Stanford University, have suggested the following fourteen teaching skills:

Stimulus Variation

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