Micro-Teaching With Innovative Digital Practices During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Introduction

Individuals need to develop their knowledge and skills to adapt well to their society and to the outside world. The primary tool to achieve this is through education. Education is defined as the work done to develop the mind and the body, emotional and social skills, and behaviors in the most appropriate or desired direction. Teaching, on the other hand, is defined as the regular transfer of information from the teachers to the students by using educational tools in an institution (Akyüz, 2013). However, education alone will not be enough – it is functional with qualified teaching staff. Increasing the quality of the teachers who make up the teaching staff will be possible by developing their knowledge, skills, and attitudes during teacher education. During teacher training, the curriculum is constantly being improved to increase the qualifications of prospective teachers. In the last century, reform movements have been made in the teacher training system and teaching processes (Lukin, Bandalos, & Eckhout, 2004). Effective teacher education programs give prospective teachers the opportunity to put what they have learned into practice, the chance to receive feedback, and the opportunity to try again and continue to improve (Darling-Hammond, 2010). As a product of this purpose, the micro teaching course is pivotal to the teacher education training needs. While micro teaching was taught as a sub-topic of the special teaching methods course in teacher education, it has now taken its place in the curriculum as a course.

Even prospective teachers with strong field and methodological knowledge may find it difficult to put their knowledge into practice. This is because the real classroom environment requires much more than theoretical knowledge. A teacher is expected to apply many skills at the same time, such as classroom management, communication and use of materials while teaching the lesson. All these factors make the actual classroom environment quite complex. In the first years of teaching, there is a lack of practical knowledge. For this reason, it is expected that new teachers and prospective teachers will be given more practice-based training in their university education (Ulich, 1996). It is possible to expand, maintain or shut down students’ meaning-making processes with different teaching practices (Schwarz et al., 2021). Thus, teachers should benefit from different teaching methods while teaching their lessons. The choice of teaching methods should be made depending on the course, including the content of a course, its target audience, its teachers, the skills that the course requires, and most importantly, the impact that the course wants to create (Wang, 2021). Micro teaching, a commonly used strategy in teacher training programs, combines both reflective practice and embedded learning approaches. In micro teaching, prospective teachers learn about the application of different teaching procedures they learned in the teaching methods course and integrate the knowledge they have acquired into their teaching (Abdulwahed & Ismail, 2011).