Three Modes of Knowledge Transmission on the Lectern: An Educational Leadership Perspective

 

The faculty hiring season for the new academic year has just come to an end, as we prepare for the fall semester. After many cycles of opening and closing semesters, and after watching people step up to and step down from university lecterns, I have gradually come to recognize something interesting: people can stand in the same classroom, teach the same subject, and even use the same textbook, yet they may not be talking to their students about the same thing called “knowledge.”

The difference does not simply lie in the degree hanging on the wall, the title on a business card, or the number of years of experience listed on a résumé. It lies deeper—in the way a person develops understanding, draws upon experience, engages with theory, and ultimately questions what they themselves already know.

If we look at education from this perspective, I often see three approaches to knowledge emerging from the lectern. They are not three fixed types of people, nor are they three steps on a ladder where someone climbs up and remains there forever. A person may begin at one level, move to another, or even inhabit all three at the same time. What matters is not what degrees we hold, but where we stand in our relationship to knowledge.

Perhaps the easiest place to begin is with those who enter the classroom carrying a wealth of real-world experience.

They may come from business, having run companies, managed teams, closed major deals, or experienced failures that no textbook could ever fully simulate. When they step up to the lectern, they bring something universities sometimes lack: the pulse of real life.

Students often love these instructors. Their lectures may be filled with stories of tense negotiations, multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns, hiring and firing decisions, failures, and comebacks. These stories make knowledge that might otherwise seem dry come alive. A concept from a book suddenly has a face, a situation, a failure, and even the texture of real life.

That is a value that should never be underestimated.

But experience also carries a subtle trap: it can make people who possess experience believe that what once worked for them will work for everyone else.

A strategy that helped one company succeed will not necessarily succeed in another. A leadership approach that was effective at one point in history may no longer be appropriate when people, technology, and markets have changed. A success story can be inspiring, but the story itself does not necessarily constitute a generalizable principle.

The problem, therefore, is not that “experience” is inferior to “academia.” The problem arises when we turn personal experience into universal truth without asking: Why is it true? Under what conditions is it true? And when might it stop being true?

That is when a person begins to move beyond “techniques.”

A technique answers the question: What should I do in this situation?

A system of thinking begins to ask further: Why should I do this? What factors are influencing the situation? If the circumstances change, what else will change?

This is often when people begin turning to theories, models, and frameworks. Not because theory is nobler than practice, but because theory helps us see something that a single experience cannot: the structure behind a phenomenon.

Someone who has managed a sales team may know exactly how to deal with an underperforming employee. But when they begin to approach management as a system, they may ask a different set of questions: Is the problem really with the individual, or does it lie in the incentive structure? Is low performance a matter of ability, or is it a consequence of job design? A management decision may resolve an immediate problem, but does it create another problem in the long run?

Here, experience does not disappear. It is placed within a broader framework.

That is the value of theory: not to replace reality, but to help us see reality through more than one pair of eyes.

But theory has its own trap.

Once we have a sufficiently elegant framework, it is very easy to fall in love with our own framework. A model that once explained the world well can gradually become the lens through which we see only what fits the model. We begin trying to fit reality into theory rather than allowing reality to challenge the theory.

And that is the most interesting moment in the journey of understanding: when the learner begins to question the very book lying in front of them.

“Is this really true?”

“For whom is it true?”

“Under what circumstances is it true?”

“Is there evidence to the contrary?”

“What happens if the world has changed?”

From here, knowledge begins to enter a different state.

The learner is no longer merely someone who receives the experience of others. Nor are they simply someone who applies existing theories. They begin to become someone who enters into dialogue with knowledge.

This is where research begins to acquire its deepest meaning.

A researcher does not necessarily believe that they are smarter than everyone else. On the contrary, serious research begins with the recognition that everything we know is always limited.

A theory may be powerful and still have historical limitations. A method may be effective and still have boundary conditions. A conclusion once widely accepted may still need to change when new data, new technologies, or new ways of understanding human beings emerge.

Therefore, a research-minded person does not ask only, “What is the answer?” They also ask, “How do we know that?”

That is a very small change in wording, but a very large change in thinking.

From What? to Why?

From How? to How do we know?

And finally:

What if we are wrong?

At this point, one important thing needs to be made clear: having a PhD does not automatically mean that a person has reached this level of thinking.

Someone with a PhD may still simply repeat someone else’s theories. Someone with the title of professor may still lecture about what is already known without ever placing it under the light of a new question. Conversely, an executive who has never conducted academic research may still ask questions that force the academic world to rethink its assumptions.

A degree opens a door. It does not guarantee that the person who walks through it has changed the way they see the world.

Therefore, these three levels of cognition should not be understood as three types of people: Executive, Manager, and PhD. They are better understood as three states of thinking.

Sometimes we need experience to know what to do.

Sometimes we need theory to understand why something might happen.

And sometimes we need research to recognize that neither experience nor theory may be sufficient.

What is interesting is that the journey does not end at the level of “knowledge creation.”

Because knowledge may be created in libraries, but ultimately it must return to life.

A theory that is never challenged by reality can easily become a closed system. Research that never touches human problems may be methodologically elegant but impoverished in meaning. And a practitioner who never returns to question what they are doing can easily turn experience into habit.

Perhaps, then, the true journey of understanding is not a staircase moving from low to high.

It is more like a cycle:

Experience generates questions.

Theory helps us see structures.

Research questions theory.

New knowledge returns to practice.

And practice generates new questions.

Within this cycle, Executive, Manager, and PhD are not three opposing camps. They are three sources of strength within the same knowledge ecosystem.

The experienced practitioner reminds academia that the real world does not operate exactly as it does in textbooks.

The systems thinker helps prevent experience from becoming trapped in personal stories.

The researcher helps both sides question what has become familiar and taken for granted.

And when these three come together, higher education truly becomes a living space for knowledge rather than merely a place where knowledge is transmitted.

Perhaps that is also why I no longer think the highest goal of education is to move students from “not knowing” to “knowing.”

Knowing a formula is not enough.

Knowing a theory is not enough.

Even knowing how to conduct research is not enough.

The deeper goal is to help learners develop a much more difficult capacity: the ability to recognize the limits of what they themselves know, and then to remain curious enough to move forward.

A student may begin by asking:

“Professor, what am I supposed to do?”

Then:

“Why do we do it this way?”

And if education truly succeeds, one day they will ask themselves:

“What if this approach is no longer correct? Can I find another way?”

At that point, the learner is no longer merely a user of knowledge.

They have begun to become a participant in a dialogue with knowledge.

And perhaps that is when education truly becomes a journey of opening new horizons of knowledge for people who still possess the spirit of learning and a genuine curiosity about the world.