The Curse Of Knowledge by Mark Needham.
From the post:
My colleague Anand Vishwanath recently recommended the book ‘Made To Stick‘ and one thing that has really stood out for me while reading it is the idea of the ‘The Curse Of Knowledge’ which is described like so:
Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share out knowledge with others, because can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.
This is certainly something I imagine that most people have experienced, perhaps for the first time at school when we realised that the best teacher of a subject isn’t necessarily the person who is best at the subject.
I’m currently working on an infrastructure team and each week every team does a mini showcase where they show the other teams some of the things they’ve been working on.
It’s a very mixed audience – some very technical people and some not as technical people – so we’ve found it quite difficult to work out how exactly we can explain what we’re doing in a way that people will be able to understand.
A lot of what we’re doing is quite abstract/not very visible and the first time we presented we assumed that some things were ‘obvious’ and didn’t need an explanation.
….
Sounds like a problem that teachers/educators have been wrestling with for a long time.
Read the rest of Mark’s post, then find a copy of Made to Stick.
And/or, find a really good teacher and simply observe them teaching.