Earlier this week I shared the 101st explanatory video published by Common Craft. More than a decade ago Common Craft pioneered using simple paper cutouts to tell stories and explain difficult concepts in videos. Six years ago Lee LeFever, the founder of Common Craft, published The Art of Explanation. It’s a great book containing concepts that can be applied to video production or nearly any story-telling format.

Shortly after the The Art of Explanation was published I recorded a short interview with Lee LeFever. You can watch that interview here or as embedded below. One of my big take-aways from the book was the idea of avoiding “the curse of knowledge.” The curse of knowledge is basically knowing so much about a topic that you forget that what you take for granted is not as easily understood by non-experts. Explaining things is something that we do every day in our classrooms and I know that I’m guilty of sometimes suffering from the curse of knowledge.