What the Feynman Technique Is — and Why Teachers Need It Too
The Feynman Technique is typically taught to students as a learning method. Named after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman — famous for his ability to explain quantum mechanics to non-scientists — it has four steps: choose a concept, explain it as if to a child, identify gaps where the explanation breaks down, and go back to the source until those gaps are filled.
Most teachers think of this as a student tool. But it's actually a diagnostic tool for teachers too. If you cannot explain a concept clearly to a 12-year-old, you don't fully understand it yourself — or you understand it in a way that's structurally disconnected from how your students need to receive it.
Applying the Feynman Technique to Your Teaching Preparation
Step 1: Choose the Concept and Write a Plain-Language Explanation
Before your next class, take the core concept you plan to teach and write a 150-word explanation in plain language — no jargon, no assumed prior knowledge. Imagine you're writing it for a curious 11-year-old who has never seen this material before.
This exercise consistently reveals assumptions teachers make about student prior knowledge. The points where your plain-language explanation forces you to reach for jargon are exactly the points where students will be lost.
Step 2: Identify Where the Explanation Gets Complicated
Read your explanation back. Where did you need more than one sentence to clarify something? Where did you use a word that requires its own definition? Those are the difficulty nodes — the places in the concept where student understanding typically breaks down.
Plan your class around those nodes. Spend proportionally more time there, not on the parts you find straightforward (which are often the parts students already understand).
Step 3: Build an Analogy Before You Build an Explanation
The most effective teachers explain new concepts by connecting them to something familiar. Before class, ask: "What is the simplest everyday thing this concept is structurally similar to?"
- Electric current → water flowing through pipes (flow rate = current, pressure = voltage, narrow pipe = resistance)
- Mitochondria ATP production → a factory converting raw material into usable currency
- Integration → finding the total area of an irregular shape by summing infinitely thin slices
Analogies are not simplifications — they are bridges. Once the bridge is crossed, the technical explanation lands on solid ground.
Step 4: Test Your Explanation on a Student
Ask a student — one who typically struggles with the subject — to explain back to you what you just taught. Their version of the explanation reveals what they actually understood versus what they heard. The gap between your explanation and their playback is the gap in your teaching.
Why Simple Explanations Are Harder to Prepare Than Complex Ones
Blaise Pascal famously wrote: "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter." The same applies to explanations. A complex, jargon-heavy explanation is easy to give — it requires only that you recall what you know. A simple, clear explanation requires that you understand your own knowledge well enough to restructure it for someone starting from zero.
The teachers students remember decades later are almost always the ones who could make difficult things feel simple. That's not a gift — it's a skill built by the kind of deliberate preparation the Feynman Technique demands.
Connect with students, gather feedback on your explanations, and refine your teaching methods through the NexusEd teacher community.