ABSTRACT
The art of explaining is a neglected area of research in teacher education, yet explanations are used daily by all teachers in all subjects. My wife, the late Sheila Armstrong, and I were intrigued by the problems surrounding explaining and explanations, hence we explored for the Teacher Education Project the characteristics of explaining, to investigate whether it was possible to improve the explanatory skills of student teachers, and to develop instructional materials which would be of assistance to student teachers and young teachers. The materials that were developed are described in Brown and Hatton (1982) and Brown (1981). A technique for examining the structure of explanatory lessons is described in Brown and Armstrong (1978). In this chapter we discuss briefly the earlier work on explaining and then describe the experiment and the results of our studies of explaining.
