Core teaching skills are the essential skills that teachers need to be fully prepared for effective teaching and work in a productive teaching learning environment. Sometimes referred to as 21st century micro-teaching skills, the Core Teaching Skills are the combination of the skills such as cognitive, delivering, learning and expressing in new and innovative ways.
It is not possible to train all the pupil teachers in all these skills in any training program because of the constraints of time and funds. Therefore a set of teaching skills which cuts across the subject areas has been identified. They have been found very useful for every teacher. The set of these skills are known as Core Teaching Skills.
Core Teaching Skills are:
- Skill of Introducing a Lesson
- Skill of Probing Questions
- Skill of Explaining
- Skill of Illustrating with Examples
- Skill of Using Blackboard
- Skill of Stimulus Variation
- Skill of Reinforcement
- Skill of Classroom Management
Core Teaching Skills and Their Components
1. Skill of Introducing a Lesson
A good introduction of the lesson is a skill, an art, which will engage students, tell them what to expect from lesson, and provide a framework with which each student can work. During the course of introducing, the teacher must not forget that the introduction of the lesson to the students is a good way to be sure that students understand what the lesson will be about.
Components: Maximum utilization of the previous knowledge of the students, using the appropriate device, maintenance of continuity, relevance of verbal and non verbal behavior.
2. Skill of Probing Questions
The success of teaching very much depends upon the skill of probing questions. Skill of probing questions can be defined as a teaching skill which is helpful in putting the desired, meaningful, clear, relevant, precise, specific, grammatically correct, simple and straight forward questions to the students in a classroom teaching learning situation for the purpose of testing their knowledge and understanding.
Components: Prompting, seeking further information, redirection, focusing, increasing critical awareness.
3. Skill of Explaining
Explaining is an activity which shows the relationship among various concepts, ideas, events or phenomena. A teacher is said to be explaining when he is describing HOW, WHY and sometimes WHAT of a concept, phenomenon, event, action or a condition. The attempt is made to relate a set of facts with another set of facts to promote understanding.
Components: Clarity, continuity, relevance to content using beginning and concluding statements, covering essential points.
4. Skill of Illustrating with Examples
The micro-teaching skill of illustrating with examples provides a sense of authority to the teacher. At a given time, when the teacher expects that the students in the classroom grasp the content of the lesson quickly, the skill requires that the teacher uses a personal and specific example to illustrate the content of the topic.
Components: Simple, relevant and interesting examples appropriate media, use of inducts, deductive approach.
5. Skill of Use of Blackboard
Proper use of the writing board can enrich the communication skill of the teacher and may make the study memorable. The effective use of blackboard leads to the clarity in the understanding of concepts, reinforcement of the idea which is being verbally presented. The skill of the use of blackboard helps the teacher to convey a holistic picture of the content, add variety to the lesson and draw attention of the pupils to the key concepts.
Components: Legible, neat and adequate with reference to content covered.
6. Skill of Stimulus Variation
Micro-teaching skill of stimulus variation can be defined as the change in teacher behavior to attract the pupil’s attention. To catch the attention of the students, the teacher uses various stimuli in the classroom so that they may produce maximum responses.
Components: Body movements, gestures, change in speech pattern, change in interaction style, pausing, focusing, oral-visual switching.
7. Skill of Reinforcement
Reinforcement is strengthening the connection between a stimulus and a response. The skill is used when the teacher reinforces correct responses with a smile to strengthen desirable responses whereas negative reinforces such as scolding, punishing the students, sarcastic remarks etc. weaken the undesirable response. However, the use of more and more positive reinforcers maximizes pupils’ involvement of learning rather than the use of negative reinforcers. Therefore, the skill of reinforcement requires the teacher to use more and more positive reinforcers and to decrease the use of negative reinforcers so that the pupils’ participation is maximized.
Components: Use of praise words and statements, accepting and using pupils’ idea, repeating and rephrasing, extra vertical cues, use of pleasant and approving gestures and expressions, writing pupils’ answer on the black board.
8. Skill of Classroom Management
Classroom management refers to the wide variety of skills and techniques that teachers use to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive, on task, and academically productive during a class.
Components: Call pupils by names, Make norms of classroom behavior, attending behavior reinforced, clarity of direction, check non-attending behavior, keep pupils in Eye Span, check inappropriate behavior immediately.
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