Developing and Using Blends: Evaluating a Hybrid Micro-Skill for New Teaching Paradigm

The Teacher Education Institutions plays a crucial role in improving the system of education by training, educating and inspiring the future student teachers. A teacher requires understanding and mastering of skills to make his classroom interactive. For this purpose the exercise of instructional designing or lesson planning becomes very essential. Although innovative lesson plans based on behaviourist, cognitive and constructivist approaches are introduced in teacher education, the learner today, who is more ICT-enabled requires modern 21 century skills and competencies. The classroom interactive process, used by studentteacher during the professional experience programme, needs a critical analysis and the recent trends in education need to be explored to modify the age old traditional approaches to meet the challenges of the present. This evaluative study explored, developed and ascertained the effectiveness of a hybrid micro-skill called developing and using blends. A number of skills, instructional designs and blended learning literature have been critically analyzed to finalize the components of skills. After conducting primary and secondary data analysis, the effectiveness of the developed skill was checked on high school students selected for this purpose. It was found that in science and social sciences, there is a significant effect of developed micro skill on the academic achievement of high school students, but no significant difference is found in teaching effectiveness of student teachers teaching with and without hybrid micro skill.