When I create a song, and I'm all alone with my guitar I'll forget theory and just play by feel. Mostly because I wanna get that special phrasing that makes me sounds like me. I'll do that as much as possible up until I get stuck and can't figure out what to play. Then I'll fall back to theory and try to understand what the rhythm/melody is doing and try to figure out what I'm doing wrong. I'll jam using scales to, and that might sound weird lol, know where to go on the fretboard. I'm a very visual person and forget just about any name of scales but I see many "shapes" on the fretboard. I have to constantly go back and relearn the scales name. I might actually have a learning disorder, I always have struggled in school as a kid. That makes it a little harder to teach but made me approach the fretboard a different way.
I think the best approach a student might have is to also understand the why and not only the what. Knowing scales is great but understanding them is even better. Like the old saying goes "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime". But we all have to start somewhere, we all had to learn chords by heart before starting to understand how they are built.