Study methods are generally about what you can do in your own time to maximize what you learn, but involving someone else in your process can also be helpful. That’s what Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, thought, at least theoretically—according to several possibly apocryphal sources, the Nobel laureate once said, “If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you Don’t understand it. The best way to learn is to teach.”
It’s entirely possible that Feynman never said this – the closest documented quote I could find, courtesy of his colleague and fellow physicist David Goodstein, stated that Feynman’s inability to break down a subject (in this case, a particle) a complex physics question) to the level that a new student can understand what it means Science didn’t understand it effectively.
But whether or not this study method actually came from Feynman, the basic principle — to know that you really understand a subject, you must be able to teach it to someone else — appears to hold true. Here’s how the Feynman Study Method works, and how you can use it to master new concepts.
What is Feynman method?
The Feynman study technique is so popular for learning and retaining information that it is recommended to college students and even real-world professionals. It’s a four-step technique that, when practiced correctly, will help you fully understand the material you’re reading. Here are the steps involved:
- identify exactly what material you need to learn (to do this, try using a method like KWL or SQ3R to determine which parts of the topic are most important before you even start), And then study it yourself using the methods that have proven most effective for you.
- Once you feel comfortable with the material, teach it to someone else – ideally someone who has never studied it before. Explain the material as if you were doing it to a complete novice (Feynman recommends imagining talking to a child), as detailed and direct as possible.
- Refer back to your source material whenever you find an element that you find difficult to explain in detail.
- Rewrite and organize your notes, break complex topics down into simpler parts, and articulate the topic until you reach a level of detail that feels almost too basic.
how does the feynman method work
The most important element of this technique is to break down and simplify the material until you feel like you could explain it all to a child. As the David Goodstein story cited above shows, Feynman believed that if you couldn’t distill a topic down to understandable information for a young student, you didn’t do it. In fact Understand It. (A similar quote is also attributed to Albert Einstein, so consider this an academic philosophy with legs – although there is no evidence that Einstein actually said anything of the sort.)
This works fine if you choose an adult who is unfamiliar with the subject to teach it – or even just pretend to be, simplifying the material into essay format yourself. However, ideally, you would teach the subject to someone who can give you feedback. They might ask a question you can’t answer, or help you find connections between concepts during your discussion after the lesson. This feedback will help you as you move to the third step of reviewing your materials, as it will give you additional things to consider as you do so.
When you’ve refined your notes, try teaching the topic again to someone else, or move on to another technique, such as distributed practice or overlearning, where you’ll periodically study your simplified notes when until you fully understand the material.
