Explaining: The Silent Path To Learning

Have you ever tried to explain your thinking about a concept with someone? Did you end up feeling like you understood that concept more?

As a student, I loved the opportunity to share what I know with others because I found it was an easy way to find what I really knew. Explaining my thoughts either reveal my ignorance (e.g. a particular part of the concept that I had not grasped even though I though I had) or deepen my sense of ownership of what I know as I am most likely prone to share the knowledge with new connections that are different from the ones made when I first learnt it.

This experience of making new connections as a result of sharing your thinking is not unique to me. Everyone have the tendency to deepen their understanding and ownership of a form of knowledge when they are allowed to produce it in their own way.

This simple act is a core aspect of learning that is often ignored.

Teachers seem to be masters of knowledge not necessarily because they have a special capacity than other people, but because they consistently have the opportunity to share their thinking. The opportunity to produce new or preexisting knowledge with the new connections through the process of explanation helps them continue to deepen that knowledge. That itself is learning. Every teacher knows that they learn in the process of teaching. This is the evidence that being able to produce and share your own thoughts is a valid part of learning.

Some research works on critical thinking skills (i.e. what critical thinking will look like when achieved in learning)?highlighted explanation as one of the core skills and defined it as the ability to present one’s knowledge/opinion in clear, coherent way with appropriate justifications.

Learning, the type that can result in real intellectual development, must include an opportunity for student to explain themselves. And this cannot only be done in cases such as summative assessment where the students are already under either real or perceived pressure to produce a certain kind of thoughts that they think will result in a good grade. There is the need to imbibe creative ways imbibed into teaching that primes student into active participation through forming and presenting their own opinions. It is the way any knowledge really becomes owned by the learner.