Effective Teaching Skills for Model-Based Instruction

Discrete teaching skills are defined here as individual, situation-specific teacher and/or student behaviors carried out before and during class. They form the next tier of building blocks for instructional models and determine the moment-to-moment decisions and actions that teachers and students carry out within instructional strategies. Many discrete teaching skills can be applied generally within all strategies and models. However, each strategy and model will call for certain skills to be used more often than others. Every teacher possesses a repertoire of such skills, which are then implemented at key times within instructional strategies to facilitate the functioning of each model. Teaching skills can be decisions and actions either carried out solely by the teacher or used by the teacher to promote desired student behaviors in class. These skills represent conditional knowledge that is applied in specific situations within the teaching strategies presented in Chapter 4 .