The 15-Minute Hour: A Brief Teaching Experience

Prospective teachers, convinced that teach-ing is the most practical experience of all (2), beg for classroom experience in their education courses. When combined with other procedures, a brief 15-minute teaching episode early in teacher prepara-tion can have some unexpected effects: both the neophyte teachers and the chil-dren benefit; cooperating classroom teach-ers like the procedures; and best of all, teacher educators find that students who have been 15-minute teachers are more concerned about learning to teach than those who have not had this exposure to teaching (3). With minimal effort and very little dis-ruption of the school, the procedures de-scribed in this article can provide such an experience for fairly large numbers of edu-cation students. Because of limitations of space, only one group of students is de-scribed here. Other sources provide more details regarding both the procedure (i, 5, 6, 7, sq., i5) and the research on which they are based (3, 8). Early Brief Teaching