An explanation isn’t complete just because it sounds clear to the person giving it.
It is complete when the learner can reconstruct it.
In 1990, Stanford graduate student Elizabeth Newton asked people to tap the rhythm of a familiar song for someone else to identify.
The tappers expected listeners to name the song about half the time.
Listeners succeeded less than 3 percent of the time.
The tappers weren’t careless. They could hear the melody in their heads. The listeners could hear only knocking.
This is a vivid example of what researchers call the curse of knowledge: once we understand something, it becomes difficult to imagine what the same explanation sounds like to someone who does not yet understand it.
I see it every week.
A parent explains a math problem three different ways, each one clearer to the parent than the last.
A teacher asks a student to identify the main idea without checking whether they know how to distinguish the central point from the details that support it.
A company director delegates a project without making explicit the priorities, sequence, and standard for success that seem obvious to her.
The usual response is to explain again. More detail. Another example. More patience.
But more explanation is often just more tapping.
So before I explain again, I ask two things:
Tell me what you think you’re being asked to do.
Walk me through your process.
As learners answer, they usually discover a gap between what they thought they understood and what the task requires.
That gap falls within one of the three capacities I teach:
Comprehension: translating what the task says.
Critical thinking: comparing ideas and organizing them by how they relate.
Problem solving: sequencing what to do next.
I still explain. But now I can begin from the learner’s understanding rather than my own.
To borrow an Ignatian principle: enter through their door.
Great learners are built, not born.