THE PERSPECTIVES OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS ON MICRO- TEACHING AS A STRATEGY USED IN TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMMES

Micro-teaching has been used for many years as a method in teacher training in a number of teacher preparation programmes in order to help pre-service teachers transform their content knowledge to their teaching practice. Micro-teaching is the common practice of having students in educational method courses teach a lesson to their peers or learners in order to gain experience with lesson planning and delivery. Micro-teaching combines theory and practice and provides the opportunity for student teachers to reduce stress related with performing, learn how to deal with constructive criticism, reflect and overcome their weaknesses. The two main pillars and benefits of micro-teaching to student teachers is the value of feedback from the course instructor and the peers; as well as the opportunity of self-evaluation as student teachers reflect on their pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge. Micro-teaching was introduced to a second year course on instructional planning for primary school teachers at the Bahrain Teachers College. In pairs, 43 second year student teachers presented a micro-teaching lesson to their peers. At the end of the course, the students submitted an individual reflection which illustrated their experiences in preparing and micro-teaching their prepared lesson plan as well as their evaluation of micro-teaching as a teaching method. A document analysis was then conducted by the course instructor on the reflection pieces using Nvivo software to explore student perspectives of micro-teaching as a teaching method for an initial teacher education programme. The participant responses obtained from student teacher reflection pieces revealed seven main themes. The student teachers discussed the general advantages of the micro-teaching experience, the importance and benefit of receiving feedback from the peers and the instructor, the progress in their ability to manage a classroom, the improvement in their self-confidence, and the skills gained in their pedagogical skills as a result of the micro-teaching experience. The students also indicated their struggles with micro-teaching such as the difficulty faced with the artificial nature of the environment and issues with time management. The findings generally indicated that the majority of student teachers found that the micro-teaching technique was very beneficial to their teaching skills. The findings will be discussed alongside similar studies. The study was concluded with recommendations on how to improve the micro-teaching assignment and how to integrate micro-teaching in a teacher training programme in order to better prepare teachers for the real challenges they will face in their future classrooms.