Abstract
Microteaching has been successful in developing teaching practices of both novice and more experienced educators and in enhancing student learning. At Queen Mary University of London, they have a highly diverse body of students. Because of this, the authors wanted to explore the use of microteaching as a teaching strategy to enhance social justice in higher education (access, fairness, diversity, participation, and human rights). In this chapter, they offer a systematic approach to support academics to fully realize the potential of micro teaching utilizing an operating systems module from the Computer Science and Engineering curriculum to promote social justice for learners. This chapter offers a methodical approach to creating your own micro teaching lesson plan by taking social justice ideals into consideration when teaching in a multicultural context. A reflection on the microteaching session plan is also provided, and potential challenges to implementing this approach are also discussed through considering social justice and intercultural development in the classroom.
TopIntroduction
Microteaching is a teacher training strategy which provides teachers an opportunity to improve their teaching skills by receiving feedback from peers (Zalavra and Makri, 2022). It is a small group activity which consists of the performance of micro skills which is recorded. These micro skills involve the ability to plan, communicate, promote interaction and the ability to answer questions. The use of microteaching as a teaching strategy dates back to the early 1960s (Brown, 1975). The process of developing a microteaching was designed as a cycle involving 6 steps: ‘plan, teach, observe, re-plan, re-teach and re-observe’ (Higgins & Nicholl, 2003). More recently, this cycle was amended to fit a three-stage model: plan, teach and observe.
Microteaching is also a proven way to teach small groups to the best of their ability and eventually produce greater learning outcomes (Naeem et al., 2022). In this context, microteaching, or microlearning as it is also known, involves scaling back the course content so that every individual student can retain what’s being delivered in little bursts. Microteaching is well known for teacher education, but microlearning is about how students learn during microteaching sessions (Aldosemani, 2019). Microlearning has been proven to assist convert short-term memory to long term, indicating that giving learning information in bite-sized portions may be very successful, if not the most successful form of learning (Chen et al., 2022).
Motivation and Contributions
Our faculty members have had some previous experience with microteaching (and microlearning). The idea of microteaching is nothing new, but it is gaining ground in the training industry because of its efficiency (Gill et al., 2022). Incorporating microteaching sessions (or mini interactive sessions) into learning materials has never been simpler than it is now, with the advent of new technologies like e-learning systems, knowledge bases, and multimedia tools. At Queen Mary University of London, as in many UK Higher Education Institutions, we have a highly diverse body of students. The University’s mission is ‘to open the doors of opportunity’ and so we wanted to explore the use of microteaching as a teaching strategy to enhance social justice in Higher Education. This includes promoting values such as equality of access, fairness, diversity, participation, and human rights, to enable intercultural development for learners (Naeem et al., 2022). Taking an Operating Systems module from Computer Science and Engineering as an example we have developed this guide for building microteaching session plans with confidence and in order to promote social justice and intercultural development. A reflection on the microteaching session plan is also provided and potential challenges to implementing this approach are discussed through considering social justice and intercultural development in the classroom. We conclude with lessons learned and recommendations for the future.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: Background and analysis of literature is given in second section. Third section presents the analysis of an example session plan. Fourth section presents a reflection on the microteaching session. Fifth section shares the possible methods for data analysis after collecting data in the form of feedback and formative assessments. Sixth section discusses open challenges. A summary is given in seventh section. Eighth section discusses how microteaching aimed towards social justice and intercultural development. Finally, the last section concludes the chapter and offers recommendations based on the lessons learnt during microteaching session.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Intercultural Development: Building organisations and cultures that incorporate individuals from a wide range of socially defined groups, such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and religion.
Formative Assessment: Monitor student learning to offer feedback that may be utilised by instructors to enhance their instruction as well as the student's learning, the purpose of formative assessment.
Microlearning: It is about how students learn during microteaching session.
QMPLUS: It is the online learning environment (OLE) used across the university (Queen Mary University of London) and is based on Moodle.
Microteaching: It is a teacher training strategy which provides teachers an opportunity to improve their teaching skills by receiving the feedback from peers.
Think-Pair-Share: Students work together to solve an issue or answer a question on a text they've been assigned.
Deadlock in Operating Systems: In a deadlock, each of the computer processes waits for a resource that is being assigned to some other process.
Social Justice: The aims of social justice in education are to increase empathy, fairness, and equality.