Study methods are usually all about what you can do in your own time to maximize what you learn, but bringing someone else in to your process can be helpful too. That’s what Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, thought, at least in theory—according to many possibly apocryphal sources, the Nobel Prize-winner once said, “If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it. The best way to learn is to teach.”
It’s entirely possible Feynman never said that at all—the closest documented quote I could find, courtesy of his colleague and fellow physicist David Goodstein, stated that Feynman’s inability to break a subject (in this case, a complex question of particle physics) down to the level a freshman student could understand it meant that science didn’t effectively understand it.
But whether this study method truly came from Feynman or not, the basic principle—to know you truly understand a subject, you should be able to teach it to someone else—appears sound. Here’s how the Feynman study method works, and how you can use it to master new concepts.
What is the Feynman method?
The Feynman study technique is so popular for learning and retaining information that it’s recommended to college students and even real-world professionals. It’s a four-step technique that should, when practiced correctly, help you fully grasp the content you’re studying. Here are the steps involved:
Identify exactly what material you need to learn (to do that, try using a method like KWL or SQ3R to determine exactly which parts of the topic are most critical before you even get started), and then study it on your own 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. Explain the material as though you were doing so to a total neophyte (Feynman advises to imagine talking to a child), as thoroughly and as straightforwardly as possible.
Return to your source material whenever you come across an element you have difficulty explaining in detail.
Rewrite and streamline your notes, breaking down complex topics into simpler parts, and further clarifying the topic until you reach a level of granularity that seems almost too basic.
How the Feynman method works
The most important element of this technique is in dissecting and simplifying the material until you feel like you could explain it all to a child. As the story from David Goodstein cited above reveals, Feynman believed if you couldn’t reduce a topic to information comprehensible to a young student, you didn’t really understand it. (A similar quote has also been attributed to Albert Einstein, so consider it a pedagogical philosophy with legs—though there’s no proof Einstein actually said anything of the sort either.)
It works fine if you choose an adult who is unfamiliar with the topic to teach it to—or even just pretend to do so, simplifying the material yourself in an essay format. Ideally, however, you’ll teach the topic to someone who can give you feedback. Maybe they’ll 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’re done refining your notes further, try teaching the topic to someone else again, or moving on to another technique, like distributed practice or overlearning, where you’ll study your simplified notes periodically until you fully grasp the material.