Micro-Teaching: A Review

On Friday, September 18th, my peers and I got into groups of four to five to do some micro teaching. Here is a summary of what my peers and I thought about my mini lecture on the basic rules of composing photographs.

After reading what my wrote about my micro teaching session on how to make a compelling photograph, here is what I found for each section:

Bridge

They found my bridge to be concise and to the point.

Learning and Teaching Objectives

They found my learning objectives to be clear and well understood.

Pretest

My peers found my pretest to be very seamlessly integrated with the learning objectives and the bridge. They found that my use of visual examples via a laptop computer to be very well done

Participatory Activity and Post-Test

All my peers found my activity and post test were, again, seamlessly joined together and found the constructive criticism that I provided useful.

Summary

Was labelled as ‘good’

Strengths

They found that my session was well structured and flowed very well from one part of the lesson plan to the next.

Also, my use of examples and feedback during the post-test were mentioned to be quite good

Weaknesses

It was felt that, during the participatory activity, a single subject should have been used. I had let the students decide on what subject that he or she would like to photograph.

One of the more tactile learners would have preferred to touch the cameras I had brought while I was lecturing

Lastly, and most importantly, it was mentioned that I used the phrase ‘you know’ quite a bit. Notably, it stopped towards the end of the lecture.

Given that, here are my own thoughts about my micro teaching session:

I liked the fact that my microteaching session flowed seamlessly between through the BOOPPPS lesson plan. I quite enjoyed the fact that my peers had a hard time distinguishing where one section ended and where another started. I liked that I gave the students a chance to apply what I had just talked about by letting them take my cameras and shoot photos. All in all, I think that those aspects really worked well for my lesson.

Unfortunately, like all lessons, there were quite a few things that went wrong. Most of these things involved my own speech. I found that halfway through a sentence, I would say “umm” or as a peer noticed, “you know”. I tried my best to avoid such phrases but I found that I was speaking faster than I could generate words to express the ideas that I was trying to convey. As well, I feel that I had brought up too many topics to think about in a 10 minutes mini-lecture so I could not properly go in depth with the details. That is, I could not fully explain relationally why a compelling photograph had the elements I outlined and I feel that this made my micro-teaching lesson much weaker than I would have liked.