TEACHER TRAINERS’ BELIEFS IN MICROTEACHING AND LESSON PLANNING IN A TEACHER TRAINING INSTITUTION

Abstract

Recent development in teacher education emphasizes the need to create teachers who are not only knowledgeable but have the ability to transfer their pedagogical skills into practice. This leads to the use of various approaches in teacher education courses, among which is the microteaching session. Researchers have viewed microteaching as beneficial in establishing a good experience amongst the student teachers in the teacher training institutions. However, their focus is mainly on establishing good lesson planning and carrying out what is planned in a mock classroom. There is a need to create awareness on what aspects of theories and approaches are applied during microteaching. This study aims to look into how educators from one teacher training institution view microteaching and lesson planning. A set of open-ended questionnaire was administered to the respondents to examine the ways they carried out microteaching and their perception on lesson planning. The findings of this study indicated that the respondents viewed learning objectives, stages of the lesson and types of activities for the lesson as three important elements in lesson planning. Student centered and teacher centered approaches were used to teach microteaching. Specific ways to teach microteaching were also presented by the respondents. Based on the findings of this study, a proposed template for microteaching is presented.