Analyzing the Impact on Teacher Preparedness as a Result of Using Mursion as a Risk-free Microteaching Experience for Pre-service Teachers

Risk-free micro-teaching affords an opportunity for pre-service teachers (PTs) to practice teaching and student engagement techniques outside of a traditional classroom setting. More time to practice teaching is often an expressed desire of PTs. Orchestrating time to practice teaching techniques learned in pedagogy courses is a difficult undertaking for teacher educators, especially while trying to ensure low-risk or risk-free experiences. As explained through this study, the implementation of a Mursion simulation to offer risk-free micro-teaching experiences for PTs served as a valuable addition to an introductory teaching course. The Mursion experience enhanced PTs’ personal preparation for teaching as well as enhancing their professionalism and lesson quality.

Online learning in higher music education: Benefits, challenges and drawbacks of one-to-one videoconference instrumental lessons

Online music courses are becoming more common in higher education thanks to the always increasing technological advances. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic many universities around the world have been forced to turn to online learning. There are currently several options to deliver online musical tuition, but most of them offer limited results. Online learning provides many advantages related to time and money saving, as well as ecological-related matters, access from remote areas and interaction between students and teachers around the world. However, most often communication will take place using platforms tailored for speech, which will have a significant impact on the lesson quality. Although face-to-face lessons cannot be completely replaced to guarantee quality tuition, online lessons can be a helpful complement in certain situations. This article aims to identify the most common limitations of the platforms available at the moment, suggesting different approaches to lessen the weaknesses of online instrumental one-to-one teaching.

Reciprocal Student–Teacher Feedback: Effects on Perceived Quality of Cooperation and Teacher Health

High lesson quality in schools is, in addition to other factors, the result of good cooperation between teachers and students. The long history of research on offer-use models of lesson quality and student–teacher relationships documents this interaction. Feedback focused on expressing the quality of cooperation can lead to higher quality of cooperation. The fact that feedback is reciprocal, from teacher to student and vice versa, helps to avoid effects of perceived injustice and rejections of feedback which otherwise are severe obstacles to the efficient use of feedback. High-frequency applications of feedback allow for the timely detection of (positive and negative) critical fluctuations of cooperation between individuals and groups and for the monitoring of processes of adaptation, as shown in other areas of applied psychology. This chapter describes the theoretical parameters of such a feedback method for students and teachers, and outlines results of an empirical study on the effects of the reciprocal method on (1) perceived quality of cooperation and (2) teacher health. Results show that, subsequent to a three-month period of reciprocal feedback, the quality of cooperation as perceived by both students and their teachers increases significantly and teacher health scores improve significantly. Reciprocal feedback techniques should be considered in teacher education and teacher training as a way to help teachers to initiate processes of improvement of lesson quality.

Understanding by Design (UbD) for the Physics Learning about Parabolic Motion

In general, in preparing the lesson, teachers determine some components namely learning objectives, procedures, and evaluation and assessment instruments. Several problems in Physics learning on Parabolic Motion indicate possible flaws from the three components in designing the lesson. Understanding by Design (UbD) is applied as one of the alternative strategies to improve the lesson quality by considering the learning objectives, procedures, and evaluation by reversing the design, namely proposing the objectives first, evaluations as the second, and lesson steps as the last step. This is a qualitative research intended to construct an alternative design of Physics learning on Parabolic Motion using UbD. The initial Physics learning design was reviewed and analyzed by experts and revised until the final design. Understanding by Design (UbD) could be used as an alternative design construction as it helps teachers to relate the three main components, namely learning objectives, evaluations, and steps so it eased the students understand the materials comprehensively and obtain maximum score. Despite the development of current materials needs more improvement, Understanding by Design (UbD) can applied for many materials.