Micro-teaching in the Digital Industrial Era 4.0: Necessary or Not?

Abstract

Background: The era of the industrial revolution 4.0 is often called the era of the digital revolution. In this era, the boundary line between biological, digital, and physical seems to fuse and become one so that it eventually becomes an era that has the characteristics of automation in all types of activities, the use of artificial intelligence in life, the use of machines and robots, the Internet of Things, networking and very open access to technology in life. Educators in the digital era are currently required to have 21st-century teaching skills to achieve the needs of superior generations in the digital age. Educational institutions of teacher professions are fully responsible for the fulfillment of teachers with the competencies needed in the current digital era. Micro-teaching is one of the teaching methods currently given to prospective teacher students to practice teaching skills in the classroom. However, the implementation of micro-teaching is considered to have many shortcomings including class conditioning that still seems unreal and lack of students' ability to design learning, especially in the current digital era. To answer this problem, researchers designed a series of studies to see what factors influenced the decline in performance. Aims: The focus of this research is conducted on micro-teaching learning methods that seem less effective in equipping teacher competencies, especially in the pedagogical and professional sections. This study aims to evaluate the implementation of micro-teaching, whether micro-teaching learning is still relevant to the digital era and to find out what factors are needed to fulfill the competencies of prospective teachers in the current digital era. Methods: A combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques was employed for the purpose of gathering the data. Mainly, a questionnaire and a focus group of discussions were used as the main tools for data collections. Result and conclusion: overall analysis of the findings indicated that the biggest obstacle in the implementation of micro-teaching is the lack of real experience regarding classroom conditions at school so that it still raises concerns in prospective teacher students. Prospective teachers described a variety of benefits they gained from micro-teaching experiences. The study ended with recommendations and directions for future studies to further examine the highlighted result.