We all have heard that the best way to learn is by teaching. There’s a renowned technique named after Nobel Prize winning Physicist, Richard Feynman which emphasizes the same. Here are the four steps in the technique:
- Pick a topic to learn: Research and read about the topic. Write your understanding in simple words on paper. Try to break down into small components and understand it as a whole.
- Teach it to a child or mimic teaching it to a child (12 year old): Remember Albert Einstein’s quote – “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, then you don’t understand it yourself”
- Assess your teaching and review your understanding: This steps is about identifying the gaps in understanding and fixing them.
- Write notes and revise regularly: Now that you’ve got a good understanding of the topic, its time to further simplify it and cement that understanding. So remove clutter in the above steps and bring in more clarity. This step helps you with developing deep understanding of the subject.
My Experience:
I was practicing this technique without knowing about it. Many would have done the same. In college, I remember whenever a demo/presentation had to be given, I spent lot of time researching from multiple sources, write notes as I distill the information, simplify the concept, rehearse it and deliver to the class audience.
I can also see the difference when I miss some of the steps like researching but not writing down notes, explaining to others but not incorporating feedback and leaving it to good intentions. Although this technique takes quite a lot of time to follow the suggested steps, its true that it helps with long term memory retention, articulating the topic clearly in simple words. It helps in building confidence, clarity.
For students, this technique is immensely useful. The beauty of this technique is its a combination of multiple good practices. E.g. Writing down your thoughts, articulating them to an audience in a simple manner, iterate & improve your understanding and spaced revision. It would work well when there’s real audience to give live feedback which can be addressed in the next iterations. However it need not be a strict blocker not to follow the technique at all. In the current world of AI assistants, we could also use them as the audience and get candid feedback.
Challenges:
The biggest challenge/downside with this technique is how do we find this much time to process, re-process information, get to what really matters and stick with it through revision. The key aspect would be the judgement on deciding when to use this technique and the process optimization. Both of these, like anything is possible with practice. The more you do, the less you would have to do!
Conclusion:
Feynman technique is indeed a powerful technique and its helps in making things stick to your brain. With the current information overload, reduced attention span its hard to retain information that we process. Techniques like these are more important in this age of distractions. This can be applied for topics that you would like to really master.