Microteaching is a scaled-down, simulated teaching encounter designed for the training of both preservice or in-service teachers. It has been used worldwide since its invention at Stanford University in the late 1950s by Dwight W. Allen, Robert Bush, and Kim Romney. Its purpose is to provide teachers with the opportunity for the safe practice of an enlarged cluster of teaching skills while learning how to develop simple, single-concept lessons in any teaching subject. Microteaching helps teachers improve both content and methods of teaching and develop specific teaching skills such as questioning, the use of examples and simple artifacts to make lessons more interesting, effective reinforcement techniques, and introducing and closing lessons effectively. Immediate, focused feedback and encouragement, combined with the opportunity to practice the suggested improvements in the same training session, are the foundations of the microteaching protocol.
Over the years microteaching has taken many forms. Its early configurations were very formal and complex. Real students (typically four or five) were placed in a rotation of teaching stations in a microteaching clinic. Teachers would teach an initial five to ten minute, single element lesson that was critiqued by a supervisor. The teacher would have a brief time to revise the lesson and then reteach the same lesson to a different group. In later years these sessions were videotaped. Videotaping microteaching lessons became the optimal practice because it allowed teachers to view their own performance.
Microteaching soon spread to more than half of the teacher preparation programs in the United States, and to other parts of the world. Though successful, its complexity overwhelmed its effectiveness as a training device and its use declined over the following decades.
The New Microteaching: Simplified
In the late 1980s and 1990s microteaching was reinvigorated with a completely new format developed in southern Africa and later in China. Because of the lack of available technology in developing countries, microteaching's format had to be made less technology dependent in order to be useful. Early modifications were made in Malawi, but it was in Namibia and China where microteaching was completely transformed.
Twenty-first-century microteaching increases training effectiveness using an even more scaled-down teaching simulation environment. The new microteaching format was primarily shaped as a response to in-service teacher education needs in Namibia, where the vast majority of teachers were uncertified and there were few resources with which to train them. In China it became part of a national effort to modernize teaching practice. Three important new concepts were incorporated:
