During the past decade, many departments of agricultural education have used microteaching in the preparation of teachers. Research has found that microteaching has a positive effect on students' views of themselves as teachers and their attitudes toward and perceptions of teaching. Microteaching also allows a student to view his or her strengths and weaknesses as they relate to teaching. Even though microteaching is beneficial, it has disadvantages--the cost and maintenance of videotape equipment and the amount of time involved in videotaping. With reduced budgets in sight at many universities, other techniques of teacher preparation are being tried. One of these methods, reflective teaching, uses competitive teaching strategies to inspire student teachers to get their concepts across. It does not require expensive equipment and appears to require less time on the part of the college instructor than does microteaching. In a study, students participating in reflective teaching were compared with students participating in microteaching on the following dependent variables: students' views of themselves as teachers; students' attitudes toward teaching; students' perceptions of the role of teaching; students' attitudes toward the type of laboratory teaching experience in which they were engaged (microteaching or reflective teaching); and students' teaching performance as measured by their student teaching grades. In this study, two groups of student teachers at Purdue University were randomly assigned to the microteaching or the reflective teaching laboratory. Pre- and posttests of the groups showed no significant differences in the dependent variables (attitudes) of either group. Therefore, it was concluded that reflective teaching is as effective as microteaching in preparing students to teach and should be considered for use in the future in preparing vocational teachers. (KC)