Teachers know the moment: you’ve explained the concept, demonstrated it, modelled it, checked for understanding — and yet, when pupils start the task, several still stare at the page as if the content arrived from another planet.
Parents know a parallel moment: you’ve tried to help with homework, repeated yourself three times, and your child finally says the devastating line, “I still don’t get it.” It’s rarely laziness. It’s rarely defiance. It’s not even, in most cases, a lack of intelligence.
What’s happening is cognitive. And the science of explanation is far more complicated than most classrooms or households appreciate.
Explaining Isn’t the Same as Understanding
To adults who have mastered a topic, explanations feel easy. To novices, the same explanation can feel opaque. Cognitive scientists call this the curse of knowledge — once you understand something deeply, it becomes extremely hard to imagine not understanding it.
The American cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham argues that thinking is slow, effortful and limited, especially when new ideas have to move through working memory, a resource he once described as “small and easily overloaded.” This is one reason why pupils don’t “just get it” on first exposure. They are not storing new understanding — they’re often just surviving cognitive load long enough to nod politely.
This connects with the challenges explored in Working Memory Challenges: Practical Strategies for Secondary Teachers, where pupils freeze not because they don’t care, but because there is too much to process at once.
The Hidden Complexity of Classroom Explanation
Teachers rarely notice how many micro-steps are embedded inside an explanation they’ve internalised. Consider the classic moment in mathematics when a teacher explains how to rearrange an equation. The teacher sees:
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the structure
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the rule
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the pattern
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the direction of travel
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the small variations that don’t matter
A novice sees:
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symbols
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panic
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too many lines
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and the thought: “I’m going to get this wrong.”
A teacher once recounted a Year 9 moment when a pupil whispered to a friend, “Is this still algebra, or has this become something else?” He understood the steps but had lost sight of the domain — the conceptual territory he was operating in. Without territory, steps are meaningless.
Why Pupils Ask: “But What Do You Mean?”
When a pupil asks this question, adults often interpret it as inattention. More often it is a request for conceptual translation — the move from abstract to concrete, or from formal language to everyday language.
In science lessons, the gap is obvious: “osmosis” doesn’t feel like anything until it becomes water moving through a membrane because concentration wants balance. In English Literature, it’s the moment when “context” changes from an exam-board word to the thing that made the writer think like this.
These translations aren’t shortcuts. They are scaffolding. And scaffolding is how novices become experts.
This aligns with the micro-progress ideas explored in Celebrating Small Academic Wins — one good explanation can unlock a whole topic, not through magic but through reasonable cognitive slope.
Why Parents Struggle to Explain at Home
Parents helping with homework encounter the same curse of knowledge as teachers, minus the pedagogical training.
Homework is riddled with hidden knowledge:
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what the teacher emphasised
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what the exam wants
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what counts as success
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which shortcuts matter
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which steps don’t
A parent may know how to write an essay. But essays are a territory pupils must travel, and the map is rarely shared explicitly.
This is why Helping Your Child With Homework Without the Stress emphasises relationships over correctness — if the explanation damages the relationship, the clarity doesn’t matter.
Explanation and the Novice–Expert Problem
Educational psychologists make an important distinction between novices and experts. Experts chunk information: they see patterns, connections, shortcuts, and generalisations. Novices see details, fragments and obstacles.
An expert history teacher sees chronology, causation and significance as a single braided rope. A Year 8 pupil sees 1534, 1536 and 1539 as three disconnected stress events.
The Education Endowment Foundation has repeatedly noted that modelling, worked examples and explicit instruction are powerful precisely because they reveal the missing cognitive bridges novices cannot yet build alone.
When Anxiety Blocks Comprehension
Sometimes pupils would understand the explanation if they weren’t busy managing anxiety. Anxiety consumes working memory. A Year 10 pupil may spend lesson after lesson worrying that classmates will notice how little they understand. That worry competes with the explanation, and often wins.
This is where burnout and motivation interact in messy ways, explored in When Motivation Isn’t the Problem: Burnout in Secondary Pupils — comprehension collapses not because pupils don’t care, but because caring costs energy.
The Best Explanations Do Something Counterintuitive
The best teachers don’t just explain the correct idea — they expose the wrong idea first. Misconceptions are sticky. If pupils don’t confront them, they leave lessons with two competing explanations in their head, and the wrong one often wins.
A science teacher once introduced photosynthesis by first asking pupils to guess where trees get their mass. The class offered soil, water, and “tree food.” Only then did carbon dioxide become meaningful. By acknowledging misconceptions, the new concept had somewhere to land.
This is explanation as negotiation, not transmission.
Rehearsal Turns Explanation Into Knowledge
Understanding doesn’t emerge at the point of explanation; it emerges during rehearsal — the moment pupils apply the idea, make errors, repair them, and rebuild fluency.
Tutors and mentors often excel here, not because they explain better, but because they rehearse more patiently. As explored in What Tutors & Mentors Can Do Right Now That Pays Off in June, time is the missing ingredient in many school explanations.
Why Pupils Don’t “Just Get It” — The Real Answer
It’s never just the explanation. It’s:
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working memory
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anxiety
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confidence
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prior misconceptions
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cognitive load
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fluency
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scaffolding
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domain knowledge
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rehearsal
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identity
Learning is a system. Explanation is just the first spark.
Final Thought
If pupils don’t “just get it,” it’s not a verdict on intelligence or motivation. It’s a reminder that novices live in a different cognitive landscape than experts. Explanations must build bridges across that landscape — slowly, patiently, and with an awareness of what it feels like to stand on the other side.
Understanding is not the moment the words arrive. It’s the moment the pupil can use those words without fear.
