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Although this was the only negative comment about the professional learning
days from the students’ perspective, a number of students’ reflections about these
experiences focused more on the ability to network with peers and district teacher
leaders than they did on specific teaching strategies or resources they found valuable.

The Potential Implications of Microteaches Post-Pandemic

Lessons Learned and Future Directions for Our Program
Our initial goal in implementing microteaches during the 2020–2021 academic year
was to mitigate the loss of 50% of the hours and opportunities our preservice teachers
typically have during their field experience. Traditionally, our practicum is structured
in such a way that our students have opportunities to engage in mastery experiences
of planning and implementing lessons, to have vicarious experiences observing their
mentor and peers teaching, and to receive feedback from instructors, mentors, and
instructional coaches. This experience is designed to provide a sheltered, safe space
for our students to practice and grow in their teaching praxis. As a result, the structure
of the practicum experience is engineered in such a way to help our students increase
their self-efficacy as teachers via all four sources of Bandura’s (1997) definition of self-
efficacy. Pivoting to a hybrid field experience model that incorporated microteaches
as an avenue to increase the opportunities for students to engage in teaching and
feedback cycles happened out of necessity, yet our team
identified several benefits of utilizing microteaches. In
Pivoting to a hybrid field fall 2021, our university transitioned back to full face-
to-face instruction, as did our partnering school district.
experience model that With this shift came the question: What role, if any, do

incorporated microteaches microteaches have in a “normal” practicum experience
or in our methods courses? In our examination of
as an avenue to increase the participants’ responses, we found that, overwhelmingly,
students and instructors alike identified elements of
opportunities for students the microteaches that supported the development of

to engage in teaching and teacher self-efficacy along all four of Bandura’s sources
(Jakopovic et al., 2021).
With this in mind, our team made the collective
feedback cycles happened decision to embed one microteach opportunity at the end
out of necessity, yet our team of our students’ first week in their practicum experience
in fall 2022, despite returning to our normal 40-hour
identified several benefits of practicum schedule. We determined that an early

utilizing microteaches. opportunity for our students to practice implementing a
lesson plan as well as to receive immediate, intentional
peer and instructor feedback would be a beneficial way
to onboard them to the practicum experience.
Learning from our previous iterations, the instructional team elected to hold the
microteach on the final day of the first week of the regularly scheduled practicum
block as a day when all instructors and instructional coaches were available to
facilitate, observe, and provide feedback. In addition to allowing students to receive
their first formal teaching opportunity of the semester, situating the microteach at
the start of the field experience offered instructors insights into potential areas of
relative strength or concern with candidates so that we could offer opportunities for
early intervention as needed.

32 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators