ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on supporting beginning teachers in dealing with contingency. Explanation has its root in the practice of raising questions and giving answers, with the expectation of being answered genuinely in one way or the other so that it gives the strong psychological feelings of knowing, of having increased the grasp of the matter in question, of having constructed some sensible meaning for what is going on. As an experienced science teacher, mentors know that contingent questions can ‘come out of the blue’; stimulated by pupils, often in an unexpected response to something that happens in the lesson. In their work Rowland, Huckstep and Thwaites described three kinds of pupil question: first in response to a question from the teacher; second in response to an activity or discussion and third when a pupil gives an incorrect answer – to a question, or as a contribution to a discussion.
