Day 32: Learning Technique 18: Teaching

Today we discuss our learning technique #18, teaching others, which requires us to imagine new and alternative ways to understand a subject and then take those understandings and create simpler, more creative ways to transmit that to other people.  You will learn what this technique is, the science behind it, why you should use it, and finally how you can apply it to accelerate your learning.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific References

Summary

What is Teaching?

Teaching requires us to imagine new and alternative ways to understand a subject and then take those understandings and create simpler, more creative ways to transmit that to other people.

• An excellent strategy for applying teaching to mastering a subject is using the Feynman Technique.

Why it matters: The ultimate test of a master is if they are able to pass that knowledge on to someone else. It feels impossible to teach another if you don't fully understand a concept.

What does the science say?

Teaching others is an incredible motivator. The moment we commit to teaching something to someone else, we're more compelled to improve our own understanding of it.

Teaching a subject to someone who knows less than we do presents unique challenges and opportunities for us as learners, because other people learn in different ways.

• This process of dissecting a subject well enough to explain it results in a much deeper understanding among those who teach.

When we teach other people we're presented with very unique questions and these questions may be sometimes far outside our own scope of understanding, forcing us to fill our knowledge gaps.

• We're actively recalling [1] information and being tested all the time by the people that we're teaching.
• You are recruiting other people to look at the holes in your knowledge. And when they find these holes, they alert you to the areas you should go back and study.

Why should you use it?

You avoid the the Dunning Kruger effect [2], which occurs when someone with inadequate understanding of a subject, nonetheless believes he or she possesses more knowledge about the subject than the people who actually do.

Questions asked by those your teaching they require explanations that dig into the details of a subject into those areas that you don't fully understand yet.

It's forces you to prove things yourself in order to gain a deeper understanding because you went through the process yourself, not just taking other people's proof at face value.

How do you use it?

Using the Feynman Technique:

1. Choose a concept you wish to learn about.
2. Pretend you are teaching it to a child—a sixth-grader, specifically. Write your explanation down or say it out loud.
3. Identify any gaps in your understanding that might show up when you try to simplify the concept; go back to the source material to find the information you need.
4. Review and simplify your explanation again.
5. Test it out by teaching someone else

If you're teaching a concept, ask yourself, how would you convey the idea to somebody who has never heard of it before.

If you're teaching a problem, explain how to solve it and crucially why that solution procedure makes sense to you.

Strategies for using this:

• When you don't understand something at all, try going back and forth between your explanation and the one that's in a book or learning resource.
• When solving a difficult problem, solve the problem step by step while generating an explanation for why you took that step and solved it that way.
• When wanting a full understanding of a topic, generate illustrative examples, analogies, or visualizations that would make the idea comprehensible to complete novices.

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Activity

Teach the Feynman technique to someone else. Then practice by going through the other learning techniques in this course and teaching those techniques to somebody else.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.