Use of microteaching as a tool to improve teaching skills among assistant professors in Medical College

INTRODUCTION

Medical college Assistant Professors of all disciplines serve as teachers and role models for UG students. They work closely with medical students and have considerable opportunities to teach and influence them. The focus is on active learning and development of learning skills, rather than on passive acquisition of information.¹ Teaching is the best way of learning. There was a perceived need to improve their teaching skills to make these teaching learning sessions more meaningful for the undergraduate students. Microteaching is a well-recognized tool for improvement of teaching skills. It scales down the complexities of real teaching, as immediate feedback can be sought after each practice session.^2,3 It helps in eliminating errors and builds stronger teaching skills for the beginners.⁴ Teaching is a performing art, which needs, apart from sound content knowledge, skills required for stage presentation. Microteaching also enables development of these skills.⁵ Thus, Knowledge acquisition, skill acquisition and transfer, all three aspects are addressed by microteaching. We believe that microteaching would improve the communication and presentation skills of Assistant Professors and thereby increase their confidence in actual tutorials, practicals and seminars.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the application of microteaching principles for improving teaching skills of Assistant Professors in medical college.

METHODS

The study was conducted from July 2018 to September 2018 at Malla Reddy Medical College for Women. Study population comprised of Assistant Professors in Malla Reddy Medical College for Women. Assistant Professors consent was taken. To begin with, each Assistant Professors were asked to prepare a topic for tutorial lesson and engage one batches of II MBBS students (session I). The students assessed the performance of the Assistant Professors and gave immediate feedback to the faculty. The feedback focused on appreciating the good points and giving tips for improvement of group facilitation skills and teaching skills. The Assistant Professors then engaged another tutorial class on different topics (session II). This was also assessed by the same students. They got three days between sessions to work on their content knowledge as well as teaching skills. A total of 4 Assistant Professors and 120 students participated in the study.

RESULTS

The results of the evaluation after two microteaching sessions showed that there was significant improvement in the teaching skills of the assistant professors as shown in the Table 1. Lesson on the whole was effective is shown in Figure 1.

DISCUSSION

In this study it was found that there was an increase of 19% in the effectiveness of the lesson after the second session of microteaching (69%) as compared to the first session of microteaching (50%). A case study on microteaching lesson study combining the elements of Japanese lesson study and microteaching technique reported that the pre-and post-lesson plans had successfully demonstrated growth in teachers’ knowledge on teaching.⁶ It was also observed that there was improvement in the planning, presentation, pupil participation, and use of AV aids after the second session of microteaching as compared to the first session of microteaching. This shows that microteaching as a tool to improve teaching skills among assistant professors in medical college is effective. Microteaching helps not only in developing skills of the novice teachers but also assists in comparing the effectiveness of variation of one microteaching with another.⁷ Microteaching has the ability to enhance the skills of problem solving, critical thinking, questioning, and reflective thinking. It improves learning by realistic applications.⁸ The other key benefits of this technique included the following: Transformation of difficult topics into learnable units, usage of advanced organizers, integration of the lecture with applications on topics, and usage of proper questions and pauses.⁹ The role of health educators can thus be effectively satisfied by practicing microteaching techniques.

CONCLUSION

The teaching skills of assistant professors improved after the two sessions of microteaching. The faculty had more confidence in teaching after the study. Microteaching can be used as a tool to improve teaching skills among assistant professors in medical college.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors would like to acknowledge the Institutional Ethics Comittee for giving the Ethical Clearance for the study and all faculty and students who participated in this project.

Funding: No funding sources

Conflict of interest: None declared

Ethical approval: The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee

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