Improving Pre-Service Engineering Teacher's Teaching Skills with a Blended Micro-Teaching Technique

摘要

In engineering education, pre-service teachers have been emphasized to serve a high quality of teaching to their prospect engineering students. Although the pre-service teachers are very successful in academic performance, they encountered teaching difficulties owing to the limited practice and experience. Moreover, when practicing teaching, it requires enormous effort and time of lecturers' and peers' attention, evaluation and feedback; in addition, sometimes they are not present during that period of time. Regarding this issue, the microteaching cycle could facilitate the teaching practice of pre-service teachers in a good structural procedure in preparing a lesson plan, presentation, materials, classroom management, and evaluation. Besides, blended learning setting could address the effort-and-time consuming issue by enabling peers and lecturers to experience pre-service teachers from both face-to-face and online environments; moreover, it makes an evaluation and giving feedbacks more fruitful. Based on this perspective, this study, therefore, attempts to improve pre-service engineering teachers' teaching with a blended micro-teaching technique. The experiment has been conducted by comparing their teaching performance from the proposed approach and the traditional micro teaching. The detailed instructional activities following the microteaching cycle have been described, while the learning situations in the blended environment have been illustrated. The results show that the students who taught with the proposed blended micro-teaching technique outperformed than those in another group; moreover, they have been more positive on the approach while giving the interview. The implication of this study provides a practical exercise to those who endeavour to improve classroom' teaching for their pre-service teachers in various fields of study.