What is the Feynman Technique?
Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who was well known not only for his ability to master a seemingly endless array of subjects, but for his talent in explaining them simply which earned him a reputation as one of the greatest science teachers in history. To get a sense of this greatness, here‘s a page from the CalTech website listing some of his most important lectures.
Perhaps the most important contribution of Feynman was a method he developed to learn and understand the content of subjects more thoroughly. Though the method was originally developed for students of adolescent age and beyond, it can easily be modified for use with younger children, who rely on a concrete approach. The technique is simple but effective, and we outline the 5 steps below.
- Identify the Topic You Want to Learn
-Choose a subject that interests you or your child. Ideally, this should be something of genuine interest, but the technique will work well for any assigned topic at school. Be certain to write it down simply without too much detail or description.
2. Explain the Topic as Though You Were Teaching it to a Sixth Grade Child
-This step could be tailored to a younger grade for younger children, but it is also important to note that young children typically require a more visual approach. For example, create a picture or bulletin board with a picture of a Dog (for ex.) surrounded with charts, pictures, and descriptions that closely relate to the subject, etc.
3. Identify Areas of Improvement in Your Explanation
– In this step, the student attempts to identify gaps in his/her explanation above. In other words, what was the student unable to recall about the subject strictly from memory? For younger students this might require the help of a third party (for ex, teacher or parent) to ask questions or identify what is missing without putting words in the child’s mouth. A group of same-age students could also brainstorm among themselves. Older children (and of course, adults) should be able to perform these steps independently.
4. Improve and Optimize Your Explanation
-Here, we come to the most thought-intensive part of Feynman’s technique. Using the (new) information obtained in Step 3, the student will refine the explanation to make it more complete and easy to explain. Answers to newer questions will be added to the original explanation to make it more accurate, informative, and above all, easy to understand and explain. This is the step that will require evidence-based research and investigation. According to Feynman, we cannot expand on knowledge without a thorough understanding of its core essentials. Even if we think we have a solid grasp of a subject, there are probably areas for improvement.
5. Repeat the Steps until You Have Achieved Mastery of the Topic
-Since Feynman’s Technique works best with repetition, one would want to repeat the above steps until A) The topic in question can be explained simply and easily, and B) The subject is explained thoroughly with the most accurate, evidence-based information. For school-age children, this approach could be used at the introduction of every unit and concluded at the end of every unit. For students of college-age or adults who simply want to refine understanding of a subject, it can be used informally or as a study aid.
Feynman originally developed this technique to help his students, but he also used it himself in order to organize his thinking and absorb knowledge of a subject more fully. He did not believe in memorizing information, but rather, understanding a topic so well that memorization became unnecessary. This, he believed, was the essence of True Mastery.
For more information about Richard Feynman and his teachings see the related blog post Who Was Richard Feynman? and assorted videos online that delve into his personal philosophy of learning.
If you can’t explain something to a first year student, then you haven’t really understood.
-Richard P. Feynman