Commentary

Everyone has had the experience of not understanding an explanation. People who are really skilled at doing something (a computer specialist or a car mechanic, for example) are not necessarily good at explaining things. But explaining, like questioning, is at the heart of the teacher’s job.

There is a difference between describing and explaining. You could describe something by just reading out of a book. Explaining means that you have to think about creative ways to help your students understand an idea or concept.

Good teachers will often explain things two or three times in different ways to help students understand. As a teacher, you do not expect to immediately understand a new technique or strategy the first time you hear about it. The same is true for the students you teach. The challenge for you is that teachers have to explain things to a whole class. Some students may pick something up quickly, while others need longer (and different explanations) to understand a topic fully. What we do know is that just explaining something once to a class and then moving on will leave some students behind. All aspects of an explanation need careful thought.

Good teachers are good at explaining things. This is not a skill you are born with! It has to be thought about and practised. Explanations help us to understand a variety of things, including:

concepts (e.g. what we understand by “density” or “prejudice”);
cause and effect (e.g. rain being caused by the cooling of the air);
procedures (e.g. how to convert a fraction to a decimal);
purposes and objectives (e.g. what students are expected to have learned at the end of a topic);
relationships (e.g. why flies and bees are insects, but spiders are not); and
processes (e.g. how a machine works).

These are the main, but not the only, types of explanation that you might use as a teacher. It is easier to become a better explainer when you know the main features of the explaining process. These are:

the keys, or main ideas, of the explanation;
the explainer’s voice; and
the sequence and structure of the explanation

Keys

What are the “explanation keys” that help unlock understanding? A key may be a central principle or idea, or a generalisation. For instance, if someone were describing a recipe for making fish in coconut cream, then the notion of “heat” would be important (too little heat and the fish does not cook; too much and the cream dries up and gets burnt!). It is not too difficult to think of other keys when making fish in coconut cream, such as taste, texture and health.

These “key” ideas will vary according to what you want the students to know and understand. In teaching, it is very important to be able to sort out the really important ideas from the facts that describe them. This process has been compared with the idea of a tree. The main trunk is the really central key concept (understanding) that you want students to learn. The big branches are the major keys to developing that overall understanding. The leaves or pine needles are the small facts that help you build the understanding of the key ideas. It is important to make sure that your explanations focus on the trunk and branches and that the leaves do not obscure this.

In preparing an explanation, you need to think about what you will do to gain students’ interest, how you will explain and sequence the ideas and what kind of voice you will use to do this. First, we will think about the voice, as this can be greatly underused or misused, which can have a negative impact on the students’ interest.

Voice

The voice of the explainer is important — is it pleasant and well modulated, or flat and tedious? Does the teacher shout? Does the teacher make eye contact as they explain? Good teachers use a change of voice to give messages about the explanation.

See, for example, how one teacher explained what volcanoes are, by telling a story about one of the world’s biggest volcanic explosions, Krakatoa, in 1883.

“And do you know,” she said,

“A whole island was blown into pieces.”

[pause] “… people just disappeared.”

“The debris from the explosion went high [gesture with hands towards the sky] into the sky.”

“And what was really interesting,” [pause]

“… was that the dust from Krakatoa went up into the Earth’s atmosphere and circled the world giving deep red sunsets for many years to come.”

“Now let me ask a question.” [pause]

“Why do you think the world’s sunsets became so red?”

The teacher here used questions, structure, gesture, her voice and pauses to aid the explanation. She probably also used facial expressions to enhance her explanation. Communicating information goes beyond just saying the words.

As you plan your explanations, think about how you can maximise the impact of what you say by the way you use your voice and other communicative strategies.

Sequence

It is important to think about the sequence of key points in your explanation. For example, it could be useful to write up key words in advance or perhaps to have a sequence of posters. You might also use the textbook to guide the students and explain ideas so that they understand the difference between key ideas and facts and the sequence in which they need to think about them.

However, if you do use the textbook, remember that your purpose as a teacher is to explain in an active way what can only be set out passively in a textbook. You need to take the explanation in the textbook and explain it in a more dynamic way. This will make the students more curious and interested than they would be from just reading the textbook. A student’s mind, or any of our minds for that matter, does not always follow the sequence that a textbook author has set out, any more than we ever use the manual for a computer or electronic gadget by reading it through from the first to last page.

Some of the most passive teaching is when the teacher merely follows or reads the textbook through. Active teaching is much more than that!
A great deal of good teaching is spontaneous. The teacher uses the students’ ideas and answers to questions to build an explanation. But good teachers still plan in advance. For example, a teacher preparing a topic will need to think about at least three levels of planning:

What is the general purpose of the activity?
What are the keys to the explanation?
What strategies can be used to help the students understand the keys to the explanation?