The international literature focuses on teacher effectiveness and problematises the concept from a variety of perspectives, including the quality of teacher preparation ^[1][2][3][1,2,3]. With increased policy and practice focus on teacher effectiveness comes an emphasis on what we do as teacher educators and the learning experiences included in teacher preparation that can optimally prepare students to be effective teachers in the classroom. Thus, researchers' attention was brought to the enactment of pedagogy in preparing professionals for practice, and the campus-based learning experiences versus the practical expectations of the professional role ^[4][5][6][4,5,6]. In an effort to connect campus-based coursework with fieldwork, a number of researchers have advocated for practice-based teacher preparation ^[7][8][9][7,8,9], which includes a focus on core practices of teaching ^[8][10][8,10] and practice-based pedagogies including representation, decomposition and approximation ^[8][11][12][8,11,12]. It is within this context that we, as teacher educators, share one example of the enacted pedagogical practice: micro-teaching. Micro-teaching focuses on the development of teaching skills via the practice of expert modelling while the novice observes, deconstructs and replicates. This idea has been developed with the identification of a number of practice foci, including classroom observations, discussion, video observations, dialogic teaching and formative assessment practices ^{[8][13][14][15]}[8,13,14,15]. This focus on core practices is central to the conceptualisation of approximation of practice (AoP) ^[11][16][11,16]. Approximations are understood as the level of closeness and/or distance from the actual reality of practice. Foregrounding core practices in teacher preparation programmes in this way can enable pre-service teachers (PSTs) to enact but also potentially adapt these practices for specific classroom contexts [13], as it situates a practice within the frame of a theoretical approach and supports the exploration of AoPs from the perspective of distance from the ‘reality’ of the professional setting.

A number of authors have advocated for practice-based teacher preparation that provides novices learning opportunities, including the enactment of teaching ^[10][14][17][10,14,17], therefore supporting PSTS in learning how to use knowledge in action ^[7][8][18][7,8,18]. Sleep [19] describes this trend of focused teacher preparation on practice as opposed to merely talking about teaching as a means to concentrate on what teachers do rather than what they know. In recent decades, research has emerged that has explored ways of focusing teachers’ professional education on “core” practices of teaching ^{[7][10][13][14][20][21]}[7,10,13,14,20,21]. Grossman [22] defines core practices as “components of teaching that teachers enact to support learning. These components include instructional strategies and the subcomponents of strategies and moves. Core practices can include both general and content-specific practices” (p. 184). In terms of selecting core practices, they are typically used frequently in teaching and learning, research-informed and evidence based, implemented broadly across the curriculum, linked to student outcomes and transferable to novices ^[8][10][14][8,10,14]. Previous research has reported the inclusion of the following core practices in teacher preparation: eliciting and responding to student thinking ^[8][23][24][8,23,24]; the use of video as a prompt for deconstructing practice ^[13][25][13,25]; facilitating a whole-class discussion ^{[24][26][27][28]}[24,26,27,28]; redirect off-task behaviour [22]; anticipating student errors and misconceptions during planning [29]; and modelling ^[10][30][10,30]. The inclusion of core practices in teacher preparation, it has been argued, may go some way to militating issues of complexity, enactment and the lack of a shared language for talking about teaching and learning ^{[11][13][16][31][32][33][34]}[11,13,16,31,32,33,34]. Hauser and Kavanagh [35] suggest that identifying a set of core practices enables a disentanglement of the complex work of the teacher and the theoretical concepts that underpin this work. This research reflects an increasing effort to develop what has been termed “practice-based” teacher preparation, which “attempts to focus novices’ learning more directly on the work of teaching rather than on traditional academic or theoretical topics that may have only marginal relevance to the realities of the classroom” [14] (p. 357).

AoPs are a critical component of practice-based pedagogies that provide opportunities for PSTs to enact selected core practices in settings that are designed to facilitate additional support and feedback ^[11][13][36][11,13,36]. AoPs refer to opportunities for students “to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practices of a profession” [11] (p. 2058) and therefore provide opportunities for deliberate practice [37]. They are designed to focus students’ attention “on key aspects of the practice that may be difficult for novices but almost second nature to more experienced practitioners” [11] (p. 2078). Similar to other disciplines, for example, psychotherapy, psychology and medicine, AoPs are increasingly used as a pedagogy of enactment in teacher preparation programmes [8], thus providing PSTs with opportunities for enactment, experimentation and feedback ^[38][39][38,39]. AoPs provide PSTs with an invitation to simulate certain aspects of practice within the campus-based classroom, thus allowing students “to try piloting the waters under easier conditions” [11] (p. 2076). It is important to note that the inclusion of core practices in teacher preparation does not come without critique. Some authors argue that adoption of this approach may reduce the focus on students, student outcomes of interest and the nuances of various contexts and rather privileges a formulaic and technocratic approach to teaching over adaptive and context-sensitive teaching ^{[13][16][40][41][42]}[13,16,40,41,42]. Scholars have also noted that reproducing practices across contexts risks undermining equity and justice, calling for equity-oriented and contextually sensitive responses to dilemmas of practice ^[41][43][41,43]. Others have rebutted, arguing that the inclusion of core practices in teacher preparation can prepare and support PSTs to adapt their teaching to changing contexts ^[12][23][44][12,23,44]. For instance, Baldinger and Munson [32] reported that approximating core practices in coursework can support developing adaptive expertise. McDonald et al. [10] suggested that in order to truly develop an understanding of the practice of teaching, teacher preparation programmes must not only reimagine the curriculum but also the pedagogy of teacher preparation and consider adding pedagogies of enactment to an existing repertoire of pedagogies of reflection and investigation [8]. Grossman et al. [11] recommended three concepts to promote understanding of the pedagogies of practice in professional education: representations, decompositions and approximations of practice. The inclusion of pedagogical approaches that focus on representations of practice provides students with opportunities to experience the variety of ways that practice is presented in professional education and what such representations make visible and explicit. These approaches emphasise that the nature of representation reflects particular decision-making and resultant consequences. Engaging in the decomposition or deconstruction of these representations provides students with opportunities to analyse and deconstruct practice into its constituting parts to support teaching and learning; for example, instructional or dialogic moves can be identified. It is important therefore that teacher preparation programmes pay close attention to the pedagogies selected to enable the exploration of core practices for the beginning professional. Dependent on this is the necessity to create infrastructure to implement and support these practices in teacher preparation programmes.

Micro-teaching, a ‘scaled down’ version of an actual classroom, is a technique currently practiced worldwide to provide PSTs with opportunities to develop their teaching by practicing various teaching skills in a safe and supportive learning environment ^[45][46][47][45,46,47]. While micro-teaching has become a stalwart in teacher preparation since the early 1960s, the conceptual framework underpinning the initiative has been replicated across various disciplines, including nursing and medical education ^[48][49][50][48,49,50]. The model of micro-teaching developed at Stanford University ^[45][51][52][45,51,52] as part of their teacher preparation programme required students to engage in a three-part process. Firstly, students observe a model teaching scenario in which a specific skill is demonstrated. Then, students try out the new technique and receive feedback on their performance. Feedback is facilitated by recording the students, and then this recording is reviewed by a supervisor. Micro-teaching enables students to try and improve certain teaching skills in a controlled way in a ‘laboratory’ environment. The class environment is profoundly complex under normal conditions, is simplified in terms of the number of students and duration of teaching and is organised in such a way as to focus on certain behavioural situations that the participant may encounter in their professional practice. Although there are different ways of applying the principles, the micro-teaching cycle can be listed as follows: prepare a short lesson plan on a certain topic; video-recording of the lesson; review the video-recorded lesson; evaluation of the lesson by the student, peers and tutor; prepare the lesson again and re-present and finally re-evaluate. Using micro-teaching as a pedagogical approach simulates a teaching experience, which is scaled down in terms of time and student numbers. Typically, this translates into a four to twenty-minute lesson which is taught to three to ten pupils where “the student teacher [is immersed in] an active teaching role” [51] (p. 78), which can be highly controlled. A number of variables can be adjusted to change the experience for the student, including teaching pupils or peers, the length of the lesson, the number of pupils, the number of re-teaches, the amount and type of feedback provided to students and the use of the video-recording.

Numerous studies carried out in the mid-1970s supported the use of micro-teaching for the acquisition of new teaching techniques, e.g., ^[51][53][54][51,53,54]. These findings have been replicated in later research studies ^[55][56][55,56]. Fernández [57] recommended the provision of collaborative opportunities for PSTs to explore pedagogical problems and engage in “reflection and critical analysis of their teaching practices” (p. 351), while Ledger and Fischetti [58] suggested that micro-teaching simulations offer teacher educators “a controlled learning environment for effective moderation and diagnosis of practice” (p. 37). The literature highlights how engagement with micro-teaching as a pedagogical approach has the potential to impact a number of skills required for the classroom, including the following:

• Reflective practice ^{[59][60][61][][66]}[59,60,61^62][63][64,62^],63^[,64⁶⁵,65,66];
• Personal preparation for teaching ^[55][56][67][55,56,67];
• Enhanced professionalism ^[47]47^[55][56][68][,55,56,68];
• Enhanced classroom management ^{[56][57][67][69]}[56,57,67,69];
• Increased self-confidence ^[49][70][49,70] and motivation [71];
• Enhanced lesson quality/planning ^[55][57][68][55,57,68].

Darling-Hammond [72] noted that micro-teaching provides a valuable opportunity to receive feedback via comments from tutors and peers in a simulated environment. These findings have been replicated by Higgins and Nicholl [48], Ismail [46] and Woolfolk Hoy and Burke Spero [73]. Engagement with this pedagogical approach has also been linked to reduced learning anxiety ^[70][71][74][70,71,74]; making classroom practices less teacher-centred [75] and providing valuable teaching experiences, which can facilitate PSTs’ awareness of the benefits and relationships between theory and practice [76]. It is clear from the literature presented here that higher education institutions and, indeed, schools of education have the autonomy to select and implement their own programme of micro-teaching, one that focuses on a particular skill or suite of skills for professional practice. It is important therefore to conceptualise and develop programmes that are informed by the evidence and equally contribute to the evidence, thus ensuring that PSTs can model the practices, knowledge, skills and attitudes required for professional practice.