During a micro-teaching session, Ms. Rao begins her lesson by relating a new…

Concept

The skill used at the opening of a lesson is identified by its instructional purpose.

Introducing a lesson, also called set induction, activates prior knowledge, connects familiar experiences with new content, and prepares learners to engage with the topic.

Application

1. Ms. Rao acts at the beginning of the lesson. She links the unfamiliar vocabulary word to a festival the students recently experienced and invites them to recall their feelings.

2. This creates both a cognitive link with prior experience and an affective readiness for the new word, which are characteristic functions of introducing a lesson.

Contrast

• Skill of Reinforcement: follows a learner response and strengthens participation or behaviour through praise, acknowledgement, prompts, or consequences.

• Skill of Stimulus Variation: changes voice, movement, interaction pattern, or teaching aids to sustain attention during instruction.

• Skill of Introducing a Lesson: prepares learners at the opening by linking prior knowledge or familiar experience with new content.

• Skill of Explanation: develops the meaning of a concept through clear, logically connected statements and examples.

Cross-check

The decisive clues are the stage and purpose of the teacher’s act: it occurs before the new content is taught and builds a bridge from a familiar experience to that content. These clues identify set induction rather than a response-after-learning, attention-variation, or concept-development technique.

Therefore, the demonstrated skill is the Skill of Introducing a Lesson.