Daily Live Homeroom With Sal: Monday, April 13

Hi everyone! Sal Khan here. Welcome to our daily homeroom livestream. As I always explain, this is a way for us to stay together, connected in this time of school closures. Khan Academy, we're not-for-profit, with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

We could have never foreseen the situation that we're now finding ourselves in. Over the last roughly decade, we've been building resources that we think can really help you as a student, a parent, a teacher keep students learning over this very unfortunate situation we are going through.

I will remind everyone before we get into the meat of today's session, we are not-for-profit. We exist because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. We were running at a deficit even before this whole COVID crisis, and now our traffic is almost three times what it typically is. I do want to give a special thank you for all of you who've donated over the last several weeks, and especially several of these corporations you see here: Bank of America really stepped up that first weekend when they saw that we had that need, Google.org, AT&T, Novartis; this is helping a lot, but we need more help. We are continuing to run at an increasing deficit.

I also want to give a special thanks to my wife—oh, Mama! This is my first COVID haircut I got over the weekend in our backyard. I think she's got some skills too, but you know, obviously, I'm biased.

So today we're going to have a fun session. I'm going to bring on two of my team members, Megan and Jeremy, who are former teachers who've been leading the webinars that we keep talking about over on these live streams. Collectively, what we're going to do on Friday, we had a fun ask me anything where people were asking literally anything, and now I'm joined by Megan and Jeremy, and you can ask us anything. Obviously, Megan and Jeremy are experts at how Khan Academy works in a classroom; they're the ones running the webinars and they can talk more about some of the webinars they are about to run, common questions they've seen, but also ask us anything about anything.

So Megan, Jeremy, thanks for joining us. Maybe a good place to start—I know Megan, I'll start with you: tell us a little bit about these webinars you're running and what types of things you're trying to get across.

Sure, thanks Sal. We are running webinars for teachers who are transitioning from being in the classroom every day with their students to teaching and learning remotely. We've covered everything from how to set up your Khan Academy account to best practices, to even having teachers who are really exceptional ambassadors sharing their best practices for different students in different areas. It could be math, could be English language learners, could be science, and so we're having both our teams share some of the things that we know work really well, along with teachers around the country sharing their best ideas to really form a community of teaching and learning remotely.

We have two webinars coming up this week: one for best practices for supporting students with special education and one for best practices for supporting English language learners. Those are on Wednesday and Friday respectively.

That's super useful. And Jeremy, what would you say that you and Megan are seeing as some of the the main, I guess, pain points that parents and teachers are facing and what they are finding value in from the seminars, the webinars?

That's a great question, and we definitely live in webinar mode nowadays, so thanks to everyone who's been joining us over the last couple of weeks as we move into this new sort of world order. That being said, I think what we're hearing especially from educators as well as parents is there's a hunger for specificity. Okay, we're now a month into this thing, and this seems to be the sort of the way the world's gonna work at least for the next several weeks.

How do we make the most of this time? How do we serve our students and our children the best way possible? What we've been hearing from teachers is: how do I do that at the elementary level versus the high school level? How do I do that in my science class versus my ELA class? For the last several weeks, we've been having ambassadors share their specialty in each of those different areas with educators across the country and around the world, and next week is no different. We want to make sure that whether you serve students in special education or English language learners, you're getting everything you need to serve those students.

Sweet! Yeah, and what advice, Megan, I'll ask you first—what advice do you have for teachers who are, you know, they didn't get a lot of notice that, you know, they are now trying to figure out how to transition their class and teach virtually over Skype, Zoom, whatever?

Megan: What's your top tip or top tips?

I think you're really hitting the nail on the head, Sal, that we're seeing from a lot of teachers and parents, and I've shared students as well— that feeling of being overwhelmed a lot is hitting everyone all at once. Now that we're thinking about this as being more of a long-term situation, I think one thing that I would share right now is that the focus immediately had been: how do I use technology with my students? But really to take a step back and think about taking those classroom norms you use in the brick-and-mortar classroom and how you can transition that and use your students as part of a community-building process.

What are the norms we want for our class? What are the norms we're going to use when we use a video conferencing tool like Zoom or Google Hangouts? What are the things that we're going to set as classroom norms for communicating with each other? So focusing on building that community with your students and setting norms and opportunities for communication first and then using those tools like Khan Academy to support those norms and best practices as opposed to putting just the technology first.

Jeremy: You know, taking the other side on the parents' side, what advice would you have for parents? I think many of us are in this boat, I've felt it over the last couple of weeks. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, your kids are at home, you're trying to work from home. If you have young kids, they make it difficult for you to work from home. At the same time, you have a list of to-dos from their school that you know you're trying to take pictures of and send it to their teacher. What advice do you have for parents who are trying to navigate that?

Jeremy: Yeah, all three of us are very much in the same boat, and there are millions of other parents out there who are asking themselves the same question right now. My own kids are causing up a storm over in the next room, so I appreciate their indulgence. That being said, I would come back to this idea from my early days as a teacher in training, which is about getting quick wins. So I know that as a parent or as an educator, you want to come in, and you want to be a master of the situation, an awesome parent, an incredible teacher, but it's tough to do when everything is changing all around you.

So what I've been looking to do with my own kids is find one moment in a day when we have a really special moment of connection. Maybe it's not transcendent learning, maybe it's not massive educational games, but just a moment we have maybe a game of 20 questions or "would you rather do this or would you rather do that" around the dinner table where we feel like a family in that moment and not just a family in crisis.

I think if you can just pull out that one moment in a day, really seize upon that and be grateful for that, that becomes the building block for routine and a family tradition you can celebrate even beyond this crisis.

I really like that. One thing that I've started, obviously—and there's a certain irony coming from me or from us—but what I've really enjoyed is I have one of those little tablet whiteboards with a whiteboard marker and I've just been writing a problem of the day for my two youngest. My oldest, who's 11, he kind of is doing his thing and he's pretty productive, and my middle one is okay. But just writing that problem down and we sit next to each other on the couch. It takes 10 minutes, but at least I'm like "okay, they’re doing something kind of academic."

Then from there you get that win, and then you can start layering on “hey, if we can do 20 minutes of Khan Academy on the math side, if we can just read together," or, you know, I'm a big fan of these Bob Books, these early learner reading things that I do with my five-year-old. You get your wins and then we published things like these schedules that you can layer on over time.

Actually, for us, I think it would be nice to create these schedules to show how you can use Khan Academy for a fairly full school day—including breaks and lunch and all of that. We don’t provide lunches, but we can tell you when they go and they could be. I think we also should—we've been saying it in these livestreams and y'all have been saying in our webinars—but I think even in our schedules we should probably say, "hey, even if you just do this part, you're a superhero, and everything else is gravy from there."

Actually, I've gotten feedback lately that I say the term "everything is gravy," and a lot of people, especially from other countries, are not familiar with it. Your general idea is that mashed potatoes by themselves are enough to provide the calories you need, but they taste even better with gravy which you don't necessarily need.

So anyway, let's see. We have questions coming in from—oh, I also see a couple of questions we could all take stabs at, some of these from YouTube. Yevette Janilla asks, "How do you help a kid that struggles with testing?" Either of you want to take a stab at that?

I’m happy to jump in.

Megan: Sure, I’ll take a first stab at that, and looking for it, Sal, and Jeremy, two-tiered thoughts as well. I think for some students it's important to identify what it is about the testing that might feel daunting to them. Is it the content? Is it the time-boxed element? Is it just the concept of that this individual, that one thing I'm doing in this one moment holds so much weight that that's overwhelming for them?

I think the first step is having a conversation with your child or student and trying to identify what it is that feels like a struggle for them because sometimes even that conversation takes off that first level of what's so intimidating. If you can get into more of the details of is it the content, is it the timepiece, is it the concept of an assessment that's so troublesome? Once you know what that is, then there are opportunities and resources to kind of dig further into that and to work with your child or student through that particular situation.

Jeremy: Anything to add to that?

Yeah, we would just say this is actually a chance for you to really sort of focus on the most important things in learning, which are mastering new skills, not just trying to get a test completed. I think that's actually a place where Khan Academy shines. I know with my own six-year-old, when she first started doing it, she was really frustrated because she was still in that mental model of "I have to get a hundred percent and I have to do it in the first go."

Then she realized that she could actually take the same assessment over and over and over again without just her to wear off. So she wasn't focused exclusively on "I need to totally ace this." But instead, she could build up that muscle over time, rep after rep, practice after practice until she gets to that holy grail of mastery, and that's what really matters, and Khan Academy makes that possible.

Megan: Something that—I’m sorry, go ahead, Sal.

I was going to say, and I wonder if this is where you are headed as well. I think it brings a great opportunity, Jeremy, what you're saying. We have such great growth mindset content on Khan Academy, and I think sometimes that concept is so new to students and so different from what they're used to in some traditional classroom settings, that it's a great opportunity to even leverage some of the growth mindset content that we have from that we've developed in collaboration with Hertz at Stanford. It's a great opportunity to use some of that and work with your student on building that growth mindset.

Y’all are both talking about two sometimes subtle things, but things that we take very seriously here at Khan Academy. One is this notion of mastery learning, which is, you know, one of the reasons why there’s test-taking anxiety is you take a test, you get a seventy on it, you're labeled a C or a D student, and that doesn't feel good while all of us at Khan Academy—we strongly believe in what mastery learning is all about.

You took a test, you get a 70% on it—not a big deal. What Jeremy was referring to is you can then take a very similar test again. And I'm often sensitive when people try to compare Khan Academy to other resources. I look at some of these resources, and they'll just list like five questions, and I'm like, "No, no, you don't realize we have thousands of questions so that if someone doesn't get it the first time, they can keep taking it without seeing a repetition of the same test or the same exercises."

Obviously, that takes a pile of resources for us, but we do it because we so strongly believe that that first shot shouldn't be your only shot and that you should keep working until you can get to 70%, 80%, 90%. Maybe sometimes you can move ahead if you need to, but then you can go back and remediate those gaps.

What Megan is referring to is the growth mindset, which is very popular, it's very in vogue these days in education. A fixed mindset is where you say, "I'm either good at this or I'm not," or a growth mindset where you say, "I only know how good I am by applying myself, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, being willing to fail, recognizing failure is not a bad thing—that that's actually when I grow the most if I reflect on that failure."

But a world where you just give someone a test and they get a 70, and then that's the end of it, you can't apply a growth mindset there because then that's saying you're a 70% student. In order to actually have a growth mindset, you have to really have mastery learning where you get back up and you say, "Okay, I'm gonna try this again."

That's how it works in other things. If you're learning piano and you mess up the piece, people say, "Okay, you're 70%, go on to the next piece." They say, "No, keep practicing those free throws."

So I think that's huge, and Megan, I like the way that you broke it down. There's a lot of things that could be happening for a student who's having trouble with testing. I'll throw out another kind of meta-level thing, which is just, you know, meditation, which sounds fancy and sounds all new age, but it's literally—and it's literally just sitting down and trying to quiet your thoughts and realizing that you want your thoughts.

I think even for very young kids that can oftentimes work because we can get so overwhelmed, because I think you know especially when people say they're bad test-takers, that's usually that category that you talked about, Megan, which is this notion of a test that stretches—you know, their brain starts having circuits go that "Oh my God! Oh my God! What if I can't answer this question? What if I can't answer this question?" And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So I think if you can kind of step yourself, step out of that, that those cycling of thoughts, which sitting quietly every day for 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 20 minutes can really help.

So there are a couple of questions here. This is a popular topic. One is YouTube Leon Ann and YouTube Sixtus 106. They both ask, "Please discuss the transition for missions to mastery’s world of math was unique in showing a more unified view of the field. Can we create a comparable view in the new system?"

And then Sixtus 106 asks, "Hi Sal, why have you chosen to remove missions from Khan Academy? Will you replace them with something else?"

Well, I'll take a first stab, which is for those of you who don't know, missions—it's the part of Khan Academy, historically, and it's still there today, although people are asking questions because we are what's known in the software field, you know, deprecating it, which means over time it's going to go away. Missions were a way to get recommendations on what to do next. Kids get practice feedback, there's all these game mechanics, there are things called mastery challenges to make sure that you've mastered the concepts and level up your mastery.

The reason why we are deprecating missions is there's another experience on Khan Academy which we've internally called our library view. This is when a lot of you all have done web searches, you fell on Khan Academy, and then just like "Okay, there's a video there, there's an exercise there."

What we want to do is Khan Academy should feel like what a good tutor would do. It will help you if you're cramming for that exam tomorrow or you're trying to figure out how to factor quadratics for your homework tonight, but what a good tutor would do is "Hey, we're there to help you right now, but you and I should keep working together twenty minutes a day so that you don't get into this stressful situation again."

Historically, missions were where that happens, but it was kind of a different part of the site, and you had to click around to find it. A couple of years ago we said, "Well, what if we could merge the best of our library view and our missions view?" That’s what we are internally—but now when you go to what used to be the library on Khan Academy, you'll see that it talked about mastery and mastery points, and it gives you these little visuals that talk about your mastery level, and you can up level them by working on a particular skill, working on quizzes, unit tests, mastery challenges we just introduced a couple of months ago, course challenges.

So we are trying to bring everything that missions are into the course mastery, and it's already getting quite close. The plan is, before we fully deprecate or sunset missions, we will have our core course mastery do everything that missions do and all the things that the library does well, which gives you more context. It makes it easier for you to jump around and understand why certain things are connected to others.

When Leon asked about the world of math, that was a mission where you essentially try to do all of math on Khan Academy, and I love that notion. I was obviously one of the first people who said, "Hey, there should just be a place where you learn everything," because it is all connected. So you know, we could—I’m not sure if we have a course, but it would be nice to create a course in our course mastery that’s the world of math, and that should get you where you need to go.

So, from YouTube, Susanna Garcia Dominguez asked, "When school starts again, is it going to be business as usual, or will we see changes? What changes do you see taking shape?"

I'd love to hear you all's thoughts first.

Megan: I think that there's a couple of things that, again, this is all evolving, right? This is a whole new world for all of us. I think some things that we are expecting are—you know, we see summer slide usually with students, and Sal, Jeremy, please feel free to jump in here. We see summer slide for students; now we're looking at a world where students have had even longer than that in the United States—especially to, you know, look at that slide and try and fill in those gaps from the year before.

I think Khan Academy has some opportunities for teachers to leverage some of our tools to be able to identify some of those gaps for students to try and get them back up to speed. But we've seen this longer gap between when students left the classroom this spring and when they hopefully are back in the classroom this fall.

The other thing is we are seeing that there's some possibility that the school year for 2020-2021 could be intermittent with times in and out of the classroom. So I know there's a lot of people all over the place trying to work on pieces to best solve this problem, and I know that we at Khan Academy are thinking about additional ways and digital resources to support parents, teachers, and students with remote learning and teaching right now, of course, but also how can we continue that to make that transition?

Especially if it's intermittent, how can we try and make that more seamless and feel a little more comfortable for everyone?

Jeremy: Yep. Anything to that?

Yeah, so I think, in addition to sort of the challenges that this crisis has dealt our entire education system, there is at least one silver lining that I've identified, which is so many of the teachers have been coming to our webinars saying, "For the first time in my whole career, I'm finally getting this technology stuff!"

As someone who never talked about technology once in my entire teacher training program, I know that it can often feel like this foreign world that we're entering into. But now that we're getting these new skills—just like our students are always learning new things—we can bring new experiences to our students. So I'm hopeful that whenever school resumes, it's gonna be business as usual, but better—with new technology, new tools, new resources to serve students even more effectively.

Yeah, and I'll just add to that, you know, everything we've been talking about, you know, the value of personalized learning where your teacher with a classroom of 30 students who are all at different levels, all have different gaps. You want to do mastery learning, but without the aid of technology, it's very hard to do mastery learning. You'd have to have multiple tests that you administer to teach students at different times and somehow try to orchestrate kids on their own path.

But the need for those things is even going to be stronger to the point that Meghan just made of kids are gonna be out of school for five months, six months. Our partners at the NWEA, the not-for-profit that administers the MAP Growth, they just released a study last week talking about how those five months—it's not just going to be five months of lost learning; it's actually gonna be five months of forgetting.

So it's very possible that the median student, if they don't get any form of intervention, they don't use Khan Academy, etc., etc., they might enter next year exactly where they were a year ago. So you would have a year of loss.

It's super important that we leverage this time, not just the remaining time in the school year but the summer to keep learning. Then when we go back to school, the reality is some kids would have kept learning and other kids, for many reasons, might not have kept learning. They're gonna have even a wider variation. So I think it's going to be even more imperative—that's what Megan and Jeremy were talking about—that when people come back, we hope that they can leverage us to understand where their kids are and then allow more time than normal.

If I were to theorize, I think we have talked to some districts that are thinking about starting the school year a little bit early. I think especially in something like math, although I think reading as well, but especially math, where once you have those gaps, it can be very debilitating to build on top of them.

It might make sense for everybody to have a double block or something for a month or two so they can really remediate and catch up. If you do have that type of time, that's where resources like Khan Academy could be really valuable. I could imagine a month of, you know, really deep—everyone starts at, you know, we had Tim Vandenberg on, and I know Jeremy did a webinar with him as well—amazing teacher in history in California who has all of his sixth graders start at kindergarten level on Khan Academy.

If they know it, they’re able to accelerate ahead. If they don’t, well, they need that to fill in those gaps, and, you know, within a week or two, they're all operating, you know, closer and closer to their grade level.

I think there are concepts like that that we could do throughout the country or the world to help make sure that everyone has their gaps filled. If there's another silver lining to what Jeremy added, I think this is the first time that people are going to take summer seriously as a time to learn.

I think people are going to realize that the variation is so large this back-to-school that there—that I think more school districts and schools will say, “Okay, we've got to take up this, you know, whatever this month to reduce this variance to let everyone fill in their gaps.” That was always an issue, but the issue is so big now that you can't ignore it.

So let's see, there is—okay, so there's a whole class of questions here. The YouTube's Nikhil Govender asks, "Are there suggestions you have for teachers who are teaching children remotely without Wi-Fi?"

Then Boy TJR asks, "The app is amazing, but if you don't have good Wi-Fi or no Wi-Fi at all?"

Zachary Meadows is asking, "How could we help kids without internet?"

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Megan: Sure, I'm happy to give my two cents.

From a Khan Academy standpoint, right, a lot of our system is highly dependent on consistent internet access and device access, which we know is a challenge for many students all over the globe. There is one thing that I can recommend here is that our friends at Learning Equality have developed a system where if you have internet access, even for a small amount of time, you can download some of the aspects of Khan Academy and use those offline.

So if your students have access even to a limited amount of internet, even for a small window during the day or in a week, you can leverage that integration so that students can still have access to something like Khan Academy. I would say even if they don’t have internet access, one of the biggest things we keep seeing for teachers and students and parents is still finding a way to contact your students.

I saw this really great post from a teacher this week, where she wrote handwritten notes for each of her students and even dropped them off at their homes. We don’t even think about, you know, snail mail anymore for students, and some of them don't even think about that type of communication.

Well, what a powerful impact that had on her students to know that as a teacher she was still thinking about them even if she couldn't see them face to face every day. So I would leverage finding ways to communicate with your students even if you can't see them directly on a video call.

Jeremy: Yeah, and I'll just add to that. You know there's teachers, for teachers who are teaching kids without Wi-Fi. I've seen teachers do things like, you know, the students do their work handwritten but at least use a parent's phone to text them an image, which is reasonably common.

Khan Academy is usable on a cell phone, so I know that there's still people who might not have, you know, they might be data sensitive or not have Wi-Fi access, but as long as a family member has a cell phone that has a data plan, a smartphone, they should be able to use us in some way, shape, or form.

We are hearing really good stuff coming, you know, I've talked to Dr. Jarrah from Las Vegas, from Clark County. They've been distributing laptops for kids who don’t have it. I talked to Ray Dalio and his wife Barbara in Connecticut; they just bought laptops. They're incredible philanthropists who bought laptops for, I think, 40, 50, 60 thousand high school students in Connecticut.

So there are programs out there. I wouldn't be surprised, obviously I don't know where everyone is from, but call your local cable company. I think they are leaning into it now, so I think they’d be inclined to give you internet access at home or open up other hotspots that might be in the same building as you.

There might be ways to get access to devices. I've seen everyone's trying to do right by folks right now, so don't hesitate to reach out. I think you'll be surprised how much help you might be able to get.

So let's see, there are other questions. From Facebook, Tasha Wright Knox asks, "Do pull kids that use Khan Academy to see what they like and don't like about the content, structure, etc., and use info to make changes?"

So the simple answer is yes! We do put our stuff in front of students, we do see how it's liked, we do user research, we do that with teachers as well, and we get the data on what people are finding engaging, what changes to the site seem to work, what don’t, and we run efficacy studies to understand is it really improving their outcomes.

So, Nabil Amma from YouTube says, "We are not able to keep continuous concentration on studies in isolation. My question is how can we overcome the situation? Need a suggestion for Megan!"

Megan: Alright! Yeah, focus is hard, and I would say student motivation and even personal motivation is hard, right? I was a classroom teacher for nine years, and a big piece of my focus and motivation definitely leveraged my face-to-face time with students.

Let’s not neglect the fact that these FaceTime with colleagues, right? That really helps you focus working as a group or motivating students. I think one piece to think about is, as a teacher or a parent, finding opportunities to communicate with your colleagues or friends—finding ways to be still social and share best practices or ideas that are working, right?

This is a challenge for everyone, and while it can feel really isolating, it doesn’t have to be as isolating. Still finding ways to work in your—as a teacher, a peer learning community or as a parent, even finding time to share what might or might not be working with your children, I think that’s really important.

And when it comes to student motivation, I think that's a big piece of helping them stay focused, and we’re seeing some really unique things coming from teachers. And, you know, necessity breeds innovation, so we're seeing teachers find unique ways of things around their house or saying, "If you do this many, you complete the assignment," or "You make this much progress," or, as you know, thinking about our mastery system if you make it to mastered in this skill, "I will, you know, walk on Legos or grow a mustache or do a TikTok video in my children’s Halloween costume."

So we're finding unique ways for teachers to still motivate students even when they're not face to face.

So, no great ideas, and unfortunately, we have a lot of questions continuing to come in. What will happen again, and Jeremy on in the future, but thanks for joining us both of you and all the work you do on a daily basis for helping teachers and parents navigate all of this.

For all y'all, as I say every livestream, thanks for joining. If you're in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. As I said, we were running at a deficit even before this crisis, and now our traffic is roughly 2.5 to 3 times of what it typically is, so we definitely need your help and support.

Keep the questions coming, keep the ideas coming because not only do we need resources, but we want to make sure that how we deploy those resources are most in service to helping you—the student, the parent, and the teacher.

So stay safe and stay as healthy as possible over this crisis, and thanks for joining. This is a fun way for all of us to stay connected with each other in this time of social distancing. I'll see you tomorrow!