From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding.
Language and knowledge are linked to a degree.
Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.
> From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding.
You also have to give yourself permission to step several tiers back and think about how to distill "next pieces" into what they know.
I also find myself handwaving away a whole lot of edge cases or rigor away in order to have a bite-sized step that will help the student make progress.
> Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.
Conversely, I find every time I've done this exercise of stepping back and breaking it down for someone else, my knowledge has deepened.
My biggest challenge with explaining things to people is the stuff they already know that's either wrong or not relevant. To save the effort of finding out later, I now ask people to explain it to me first, tell me everything they know about this, before I can figure out how far back I have to step before explaining it all.
I'm also a "What do you think happens?" person. It both gives me a place to start, and a bunch of stuff to peg other stuff onto that I'm about to say. If you can link points of a good explanation to points of a bad, but intuitive naïve explanation, it makes it easier to remember the good explanation.
That is the the special skill of a teacher. But any expert should be able to competently explain something to someone who isn't harboring a mistaken belief.
I think the ability to explain well requires you to be an expert, but also be able to quickly trace back all the definitions to what your student already knows.
From my experience “experts” who are unable to explain well typically have an incomplete understanding.
Language and knowledge are linked to a degree.
Personally I have had subject I thought I was an expert an and when I went to explain them I realized the shortcomings of my understanding. Later when I was truly an expert my ability to explain them improved.