Microteaching: What is it that is going on here?

Abstract

Although microteaching has been found to be an effective way of helping preservice teachers learn about what it means to teach and while students themselves find it useful, researchers have not yet examined the task itself to discover exactly what it means to “microteach,” thus the purpose of this study was to learn more about the interactional structure of the task. The results of discourse analysis that was performed on 22 videotapes of microteaching showed that the question of how to frame the task was a constant challenge to the students, who must simultaneously negotiate the roles of teacher, student, classmate, and peer/friend. Analysis of the tapes, as well as of questionnaires in which participants described their perception of the activity and explained how they approached the task, reveals that microteaching resembles “performance” or “classroom task” to a much greater extent than it does “teaching.”

Introduction

The term “microteaching” refers to the common practice of having students in educational methods courses “teach” a lesson to their peers in order to gain experience with lesson planning and delivery. Microteaching has generally been found to be an effective way of helping preservice teachers learn about and reflect upon effective teaching practice (I’Anson, Rodrigues, & Wilson, 2003; Kpanja, 2001, Klinzing, 2002; Metcalf, Hammer, & Kahlich, 1996; Saunders, Gall, Nielson, & Smith, 1975; Simbo, 1989) and research on student perspectives has shown that students themselves find it useful (Altman & Ramirez, 1971; Amobi, 2005; Benton-Kupper, 2001; Clifford, Jorstad, & Lange, 1977; Huber & Ward, 1969; Metcalf, 1993, Mills, 1991). Perhaps because of the generally positive findings regarding this common teacher education task, we have not yet examined the task itself to discover exactly what it means to microteach, especially from the perspective of the students. The general purpose of this study was, thus, to learn more about the interactional characteristics of microteaching, including the ways in which students approach the task.

This project had its origins in some discussions about the nature of microteaching that occurred in a master's level teacher education course I taught in the spring of 2004 in which students were required to analyze a videotaped sample of their teaching. As most did not have access to an actual classroom, they did microteaching instead. During an in-class workshop to help students with their analyses, one student attributed some of the unusual interaction and behaviors in his microteaching to the task itself: He did not view his videotape as representative of his “real” teaching behaviors, as microteaching was “fake teaching.” This admission led others to share their own confusion and critiques regarding this activity, developing a conversation that continued throughout the semester. At the same time as they insisted that they did find microteaching quite valuable, they also professed to a strong level of discomfort. As one student, in a particularly candid remark described it, “I feel like a complete fool doing these.”

Students also often expressed anxiety about teaching their peers, and some went on in their final projects to analyze the ways in which their identities as friends or classmates “leaked through” in interaction with their peers during their microteaching. Their comments were at odds with Metcalf's (1993) finding based on a questionnaire she administered that preservice teachers did not view microteaching as “just pretend,” and considered themselves to be engaged in genuine teaching and learning.

Inspired by these discussions, I decided to collect videotapes of microteaching for systematic analysis to explore what the characteristics are that mark microteaching as a genre of activity. Working from a interactional sociolinguistic perspective, I drew initially on frame theory, using Goffman's (1974) question “What is it that's going on here?” (p. 8) as a starting point for the analysis. This is the question which, Goffman explains, participants in any sort of interaction must answer in order to approach the event appropriately. While there can always be multiple responses to this question, often there is enough agreement on the definition of a situation for interaction to proceed smoothly. For these students, uncertainty about the definition of the activity of microteaching and their role in it created considerable anxiety, thus it seemed worthwhile to examine more closely.

Goffman's work also seemed like a good starting point because of his emphasis on performance. Pineau (1994) notes that “[h]istorically there are strong links between performance methodology and methods of teacher training. ‘Rehearsing’ one's teaching personae is well established in educational literature and practice” (p. 17). Indeed, performance emerged as an important means of framing the event for these students, who were simultaneously performing a variety of selves and creating a performance in the dramaturgical sense as they role-played being a teacher. In teacher education, performance theory can usefully illuminate the ways in which an identity as “teacher” develops as students move through a degree program and into classrooms of their own. This involves an examination of everyday performances of self. Microteaching involves not only such performances of identity, but it can also be analyzed as a type of theatrical performance.

As with any examination of the construction of frames around human activity, I found multiple frames that shifted and overlapped from moment to moment as the students attempted to manage several contradictory identities at once. Examination of the data revealed that microteaching was only rarely framed as “teaching”; the dominant frames instead constructed the activity as “educational requirement” and “performance.” After problematizing the microteaching event through an examination of the data, I will discuss potential implications for teacher education, including the ways in which an explicit framing of microteaching as performance may make the activity more useful to the students. First, however, I review previous work relating performance theory and teacher education, and discuss further what aspects of performance theory I have selected from this broad field of possibilities and how these contribute to the present study.