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Have you ever wondered what is micro and macro-teaching? This blog will answer that question. We’ll look into the details of these methods, including aspects like the steps of micro-teaching and the features of micro-teaching. Let’s start with micro-teaching first.
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What Is Micro-teaching?
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What Is the Meaning Of Macro-teaching?
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Difference Between Micro-teaching And Macro Teaching
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Upskill To Improve Your Teaching Skills
What Is Micro-teaching?
Micro-teaching is a scaled-down teaching technique developed for the training of pre-service and in-service teachers. It can also be used as an effective method of coaching. The class size is reduced to a maximum of 10 pupils, and the time duration allotted for practicing each skill is up to 10 minutes. The topic size and classroom complexities also get reduced.
The core skills to practice are as follows:
- Lesson planning: A teacher needs to micro plan a lesson for effective delivery and high learning outcomes. Micro lessons should be relevant, concise, and logically organized.
- Lesson introduction: A teacher needs to be well prepared on a topic. They should set a context to the lesson being delivered and explain the activities briefly to keep learners interested for the rest of the session.
- Posing questions: It’s important for a teacher to develop the skill to ask questions at an appropriate time to check students’ level of absorption of concepts and invite questions from them to clarify their doubts.
- Reinforcement: A teacher is expected to inspire spontaneous and enthusiastic participation of learners, and also to revise lessons for improving knowledge retention.
- Stimulus variation: A teacher always faces a challenge to maintain a high level of attention of learners, which may be achieved through a variety of gestures, tonal quality, and speech variations, humor, and positive body language.
- Explaining: It Involves the ability to understand concepts thoroughly and articulate them to the learners with clarity.
- Illustrating with examples: A teacher should be able to explain a concept through relevant examples, illustrations, working models, or any known natural phenomenon.
The list of skills mentioned above is indicative. Meticulous practice and adoption of the skills will help graduate a pre-service teacher to a higher level.
What Is the Meaning Of Macro-teaching?
The meaning of macro-teaching could be understood etymologically. The word ‘macros’ originated from the Greek word ‘Makros’, meaning long and large. The macro-teaching technique indicates that content is being delivered to a larger audience, for example, a class of 40 students, and for a longer period of time, usually up to an hour or more. Learners are expected to take assessments, usually written tests or projects, to demonstrate their learnings. A business may use macro learning for onboarding and induction programs to provide an overview of the organization and for compliance and transformation initiatives to set the context, provide an overview and articulate a common understanding of future possibilities. The world of classrooms, workshops, and lectures are synonymous with macro-teaching skills and type of instructional delivery. Following are some of the features of macro-teaching:
- The various features of macro-teaching involve instructors, coaches, mentors, and the domain knowledge delivered over time and focus on the overall development of students.
- Macro-teaching skills effectively help in mapping out teaching strategies and methods. They help evaluate the effectiveness of a teaching strategy in terms of learning outcomes.
- Macro-teaching skills help anticipate problems faced by students in advance and come up with effective solutions.
- Macro-teaching skills help in improving both learning outcomes and teaching methods. They help in designing an efficient curriculum plan for a subject to be taught for an academic year and identify resources and materials required in the classroom (teaching aids).
The above-mentioned features of macro-teaching aid teachers and students to gain a better learning outcome and a deeper understanding of new knowledge, all while developing and expanding perspectives.
A teacher may apply the following steps of macro-teaching for lesson planning and content delivery:
- Learning objectives should be first identified.
- A realistic timeline should be created to complete a syllabus.
- Specific learning activities should be planned in congruence with learning objectives.
- A lesson should be sequenced to deliver it in an engaging manner and reinforce learning.
- An effective battery of evaluation tests should be planned to assess the learning outcomes of students.
These points may resolve your basic question, what is macro teaching? It’s a long-term approach toward completing a syllabus by implementing thorough lesson planning, delivery, and evaluation tests.
Difference Between Micro-teaching And Macro Teaching
The delivery of teaching content could be done by teachers by blending micro-teaching and macro-teaching techniques. The right blend of these teaching strategies has to be implemented to continuously improve the learning outcomes of students along with the skills of a teacher. Each method of micro and macro teaching offers its unique benefits, shapes teaching strategies, provides different levels of learning outcomes and creates customized evaluation parameters. Following is the difference between micro and macro-teaching.
Micro-teaching
- A teacher delivers content for a short period of time (usually 10 minutes).
- The maximum size of the learners/participants isn’t more than 10 in number.
- Micro lesson planning is done for daily lesson planning.
- This technique is used to improve the teaching skills of pre-service teachers.
- It’s oriented toward developing a specific skill at a time for teachers and delivering a limited concept to students.
- It involves continuous and instantaneous feedback and improvement opportunities as the teaching skill sets are yet to be developed by the teacher.
- The learning outcomes are measured for a lesson only.
The focus is primarily on lesson planning or a small section of a lesson/chapter, focused mainly on developing teaching skills and receiving instantaneous feedback from an observer teacher and/or students.
Macro-teaching
- A teacher delivers content for an extended period of time (usually an hour).
- The size of a class is usually 40 for school classrooms and may extend to a higher number if it’s a public lecture.
- It’s used by experienced teachers to introduce various skills to students throughout the academic year. For example, multiplication, subtraction, addition concepts of mathematics.
- It allows teachers to introduce a new syllabus to the students at once.
- The measurement of the learning outcome of a learner is done for a larger syllabus and usually through a written paper format and multiple-choice questions (MCQs).
- Macro-teaching is more forward-planning-oriented and allows a teacher to stay on track while delivering a syllabus.
- Lesson planning for a longer time duration is done for macro-teaching.
The focus is primarily on the long-term completion of syllabus and lesson planning, which allows a teacher to preempt any obstacles and overcome them for lesson delivery and relevant evaluation tests.
Hope the article makes you now understand better -What is micro and macro-teaching?
Upskill To Improve Your Teaching Skills
Technology is playing a key role in reshaping the education sector by providing innovative platforms and tools. It’s fast diluting the difference between micro-teaching and macro-teaching. More blended teaching is beginning to emerge, encompassing the best of micro-teaching and macro-teaching techniques to improve learning outcomes. Harappa offers a powerful and Inspiring Faculty Program that offers both micro and macro- teaching techniques to aid teachers in improving their skills.
