teacher education physical science: March 2014

MICROTEACHING: THEORY AND PRACTISE IN TEACHER COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT

SHYNI FRANCIS.S.R

Introduction

Micro teaching technique was first adopted at Stanford University, USA in 1961 by Dwight W.Allen. The Stanford teacher education program staff members sought to identify, isolate and build training programmes for critical teaching skills. There are general teaching skills that can be applied at many levels, for teaching many different subjects. Micro teaching has since then be refined and applied not only in teacher training, but also in business, nursing and the army. Research in India and other developing countries has shown that conventional micro teaching methods help to improve teaching competencies. The first reference to Micro teaching in India goes back to 1967 when Tiwari initiated a project on Micro teaching in the Government Central Pedagogical Institute at Allahabad. The centre of Advanced Studies in Education, Baroda organized a series of workshops at Baroda during 1970-1975. The British High Commission in 1975 in collaboration with the Stirling University, Scotland organized workshops on Micro teaching in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. Besides these workshops, the NCERT took on four research projects at the national level, which helped in spreading the concept of Micro teaching in almost all states in India. Micro teaching has now been included in the B.Ed curriculum in most of the Universities.

Definitions of Micro teaching

Micro teaching has been defined in several ways: In 1966 D.W.Allen defined micro teaching as “a scaled down teaching encounter in class size and class time”.

In 1968 Allen and Eve defined Micro teaching as “a system of controlled practice that makes it possible to concentrate on specific teaching behaviour and to practice teaching under controlled conditions”.

In 1968 M.B.Buch has given a definition of micro teaching as “a teacher education technique which allows teachers to apply clearly defined teaching skills to carefully prepared lessons in planned series of 5 to 10 minutes. It encounters with a small group of real students ,often with an opportunity to observe the results on videotape”.

In 1971 W.R.Mcaleese and Unwin define micro teaching as “a scaled down teaching encounter in terms of time, class, size, lesson, length and teaching complexity”.

In 1976 B.K.Passi writes that “the most important point in microteaching is that teaching is practiced in terms of definable, observable, measurable and controllable teaching skills”.

What is microteaching?

It is a training procedure for teacher preparation aimed at simplifying the complexities of the regular teaching process. Micro teaching is a scaled down sample of teaching in which a teacher teaches a small unit to a small group of 5 to 10 pupils for a small period of 5 to 10 minutes.

Objectives of Microteaching:

1. 1. To enable teacher-trainees to learn and assimilate new teaching skills under controlled condition

2. To enable teacher-trainees to gain confidence in teaching, and to master a number of skills by dealing with a small group of pupils.

Characteristics of Microteaching:

1. It is a scaled down teaching.

2. It is less complex than regular teaching.

3. It involves lesser number of students, usually 5 to 10.

4. It’s duration is short-about 5 to 10 minutes.

Steps in Micro teaching

1. Defining the skills to be developed in terms of specific teaching behavior.

2. Demonstration of the skill by the teacher educator by taking a lesson.

3. Based on the model, preparation of a lesson plan by the teacher trainee, for a suitable topic, which calls for application of the skill anticipated.

4. Teaching of the lesson by the teacher trainee in a simulated set up, in the presence of observers.

5. Providing of immediate feed-back to the teacher trainee by the observers with a view to help him improve the skill.

6. Arranging re-planning, re-teaching and re-feed back sessions.

7. Repetition of “plan,teach,feedback,re-plan,re-teach,and re-feed back” cycle till the Skill is acquired.

The exact teach-reteach cycle of microteaching can be presented diagrammatically as given below(The steps in microteaching session are)

Figure1:Microteaching cycle.

a. P lanning: This involves selection of the skill to be practised, awareness of components of that skill; selection of a suitale concept ; writing of microlesson with specific objectivess.

b. Teaching: The following setting is suggested for the microteaching technique

Time: 5 minutes

Students: Peer group-5 or so in number

Supervisor: 1 or 2

If possible use of CCTV facility could be made to enable the teacher trainee to get a firsthand look at his weaknesses.

c. Feedback: This is a vital aspect of the microteaching cycle. To be effective it must be clearly related to the model of the teaching skill used. Appraisal guides add to the comments of the supervisor and fellow students .They focus the feedback on to specific behaviours and can be used for the analysis session or be just given to the teacher trainee with a written comment or rating of his skill performance.

d Replan: Keeping in mind the feedback received from the supervisor, the teacher trainee replans her micro lesson, writing another micro lesson plan or editing the existing one.

e Re-teach: The teacher trainee reteaches, incorporating the suggested changes, with the same whether there is any improvement in skill attainment.

f. Refeedback: The supervisorassesses the lesson again, pointing out the improvements and lapses.

Microteaching Procedure:

Microteaching procedure involves three phases. They are:

1. Knowledge acquisition phase: Observing the demonstration of the skill and analyzing it and discussing about the demonstration.

2. Skill acquisition phase: Preparing the micro lesson involving the skill and practicing the skill while teaching.

3. Transfer phase: Evaluating performance through feedback, replan, re-teach and transfer of skill to actual class teaching in macro sessions. This process is summarized in the following table.
Why use of microteaching?

1. The teacher trainee is made aware of the various skills of which teaching is composed.

2. Selected skills are chosen and discussed in a briefing session.

3. Microteaching simulates the classroom scene and gives the teacher trainee an experience of real teaching.

4. Feedback enables the teacher trainee to consciously eradicate or erase irritating habits and mannerisms.

5. It is economical in terms of time and money.

6. It is flexible and can be used in variety situations- business schools, the police etc.

7. The teacher trainee can focus his/her attention on clearly defined aspects of his/her behavior. This removes problems of discipline, control and other organizational activities.

8. Patterns of classroom interaction and communication between the teacher and the students can be objectively and easily studied. Organization of the timing of teach/reteach cycle can be organized.

Microteaching skills:

The major premise underlying the concept of microteaching is that the complex teaching act can be split into component skills; each simple well- defined and limited. These skills can be identified, practiced, evaluated, controlled and acquired through training. A few definitions will clarify the meaning of the term microteaching.

Micro teaching is defined as “a set of related teaching behaviours which is specified type of classroom interaction situations tend to facilitate the achievement of specified type educational objectives”.

Passi (1976)defines teaching skill as “a group of teaching acts or behaviors intended to facilitate pupil’s learning directly or indirectly.

Integration of skills:

Having armed the teacher trainees with a battery of teaching sub skills, the next stage is the integration of those sub-skills into the major skill. Deliberate programmes for integration of sub skill is called Link pratise or link lessons. There are many methods for link practice. One of the methods is that after practicing three sub skills separately, the trainee may combine all the three sub skills in a lesson of 10 minutes. He then practices another three sub skills separately and links them.Then he combines all the six sub skills in a single lesson of 15 minutes. And so on till all the sub skills are combined in a macro lesson of 40 minutes and teaching a full class.

Advantages of Microteaching

Microteaching is flexible and adaptable to different needs and purpose, it has listed below:

1. Teacher-trainees trained through microteaching are found to perform better than the ones trained by traditional method.

2. It employs real teaching for the purpose of developing skills.

3. It helps accomplish specific teacher competencies.

4. The teaching practice gains a higher degree of organization because factors such as time, number of students, etc. could be controlled.

5. It helps gain deeper knowledge due to feedback and preplan, reteach cycles.

6. It is more effective in modifying teacher behavior.

7. It helps in developing important teaching skills such as questioning reinforcement of student participation, etc.

8. It is an effective technique for transfer of teaching competencies to class room.

9 It provides many opportunities to trainees to build up desired patterns of behavior in a non-threatening set-up.

Limitations of microteaching:

1. It covers only a few specific skills.

2. It may raise administrative problems while arranging micro lessons.

3. It is still oriented ;content is not emphasized.

4. It emphasizes specific skills; but neglects integrated skills.

Meaning of the term competency

The term “competency” or “competence “is frequently used when we talk about any profession or work that express one’s quality of being competent possessing adequate professional skills knowledge, qualification or capacity. When we talk about teacher or his profession we come to understand that teaching constitutes one of the major tasks of a teacher “teaching competency”, in one way or the other has been a debatable term. Both the terms were tried to be defined separately and also together in different ways by social scientists at different time.

Teaching Competency

According to some authors teaching competency includes knowledge, attitude, skill and other teacher characteristics. Some others perceive teaching competence as teacher behaviors that produce intended effects.

In 1979 Rama defines teaching competency as, the ability of a teacher manifested through a set of overt teacher classroom behaviors which is a resultant of the interaction between the presage and the product variables of teaching with in a social setting”.

Presage variables means- knowledge a set of abilities and skills.

Teaching can be defined as a set of observable teacher behaviours that facilitate or bring about pupil learning”.

Concept of teaching competency

Teaching is an important part of educational process. It’s special function is to impart knowledge, develop, understanding and skills. Teaching is usually associated with 3r’s i.e,Reading. Writing &Arithmetic (imparting knowledge of school subjects). Education on the other hand , has a wider connotation terms of 7r’s Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Rights, Responsibilities, Relationships, Recreation(new requirement and ideals of democratic setup).

Teaching is a relationship , which is established among three focal points in education-the teacher, the students and the subject matter. Teaching is a process by which the teacher brings the students and the subject matter together. The teacher and the taught are active , the former in teaching, and the latter in learning. Teaching is not “telling and testing”. Teaching is a complex art of guiding students through variety of selected experiences towards the attainment of appropriate teaching learning goals.

Meaning of teaching competency

Teaching competency means an effective performance of all the observable teacher behavior that brings about desirable pupil outcomes. Teaching competency involves effective use of variable teaching skills.

In present study teaching is perceived, as a set of teaching skills where in a teaching behaviors that facilitate & bring about a specific instructional objective.

Teaching Competences

Teaching competences are focused on the role of the teacher in the classroom directly linked with the craft of teaching with professional knowledge and skills mobilized for action.

Teacher competences imply a wider systematic view of teacher professionalism, on multiple levels.-the individuals, the school, the local community, professional networks.

Conclusion

Effective system for the education of new teachers and the professional development of serving teachers rely on a shared understanding of the competences that teachers need to deploy in different levels of schooling or at different stages in their career. Such a profile or framework of teacher competences can also be used to improve the effectiveness of the recruitment and selection of candidates for teaching posts and consist teacher in planning their professional development. Teacher education policies cannot be designed in isolation from policies from different ways in which competence frameworks can be used to improve our quality of teaching and therefore the attainment of learners. It has identified the key factors in the successful development and implementation of the competence approach to teaching. The ultimate purpose of systems of teacher education, professional development must be to support learning by students. Enabling all teachers to develop their competences means stimulating teacher’s engagement in career log learning assessing the development of the teachers and providing appropriate and relevant learning opportunities for all teachers.

Reference

Dr.K.Sivaraian(2003)Methodology of teaching science-Calicut-Calicut University.

Radha Mohan(1995)-Innovative science teaching-New Delhi-pretties –hall of India .

Private Limited Competency based education.(www.http//pure.au.dk)logged on (01/03/2014)

NCFTE2010(ec.europa.eu/education)logged on (02/03/2014)

Multiple Choice Questions

I. Microteaching is a scaled down teaching true or false?

II. Microteaching technique was first adopted at………………..?Stanford University,USA.

University Questions

1. Explain the procedure for using microteaching technique for equipping student teachers with teaching skills?

2. Develop a microteaching lesson on any one of the teaching skill?

33. What is Link Practice? Comment on its effectiveness in bridging microteaching with full class teaching?

4.Comment on the effectiveness of microteaching in equipping the student teachers with teaching skills. How it can be bridged with full class room teaching?

5.Explain microteaching cycle?

6.Define microteaching? Explain the components of the skill ‘introducing a lesson’?

7.Explain Link practice?

8.What is meant by feedback? How will you use the knowledge of feedback by assessing performance to enhance student’s progress?

PROCEDURE	RES PONCE
Prepare a video related to the topic Ohm’s law .Then tell about some questions to the students.	Students carefully listened.
What is a metal	Metals are good conductors.
What are the examples of metals	Gold,copper, aluminium,iron etc.
What is electric current	Electric current is the flow of charge.
What is resistance	The hindrance in the flow of electricity is called resistance
What is Ohm’s law	If the temperature is constant,the ratio of the potential difference between the ends of a conductor to the current through it will be a constant.This is Ohm’s law

teacher education physical science

Sunday, 30 March 2014

ROLL PLAY SCRIPT

ICT INTEGRATED LESSON TEMPLATE

Saturday, 29 March 2014

Seminar-Micro Teaching