Which one of the following is a key behaviour in effective teaching ?

Concept: Gary Borich's framework of effective teaching sorts teacher behaviours into two families. Key behaviours are the essential ones that must be present for instruction to be effective; helping behaviours are supporting techniques used to put the key behaviours into practice.

The five key behaviours are lesson clarity, instructional variety, teacher task orientation, engaging students in the learning process, and student success rate. The five helping behaviours are using student ideas and contribution, structuring, questioning, probing, and teacher affect.

Application: Place each offered behaviour in the family it belongs to.

Contrast: The three remaining behaviours are all supporting techniques rather than essentials.

• Using student ideas and contribution - acknowledging, modifying, applying, comparing and summarising what a learner says; it supports engagement, but instruction can still be effective without it.

• Structuring - advance organisers that signal what is coming and summary comments that recap what has passed; it supports lesson clarity rather than replacing it.

• Questioning - content questions that check recall and process questions that ask learners to reason aloud; it is a vehicle through which several key behaviours are delivered.

Result: Instructional variety - variability in presentation mode, materials, question type and learning activity within a single lesson - is the key behaviour among the four options.