Mastery Learning in Mr. Vandenberg’s Class

I'm Tim Vandenberg and I've been teaching for 25 years: 17 years in Hesperia, California, 6th grade at Carmel Elementary School. Hesperia is a lower socio-economic status area on average, especially among our student population. 100% of our students at this school are on free or reduced lunch.

The traditional model among most schools is just moving kids along by age, whether they've mastered the skills or not. So by the time they come to me in sixth grade, they've got so many gaps in their learning because they haven't mastered the skills K through five. It's extremely difficult for most teachers, probably all teachers, to truly meet each kid at their individual mastery level. You're going to have a third of the class tracking with you, a third of the class wishing you'd move faster, and a third of the class wishing you'd re-teach that a few more times.

My goals as a teacher using Khan Academy is for my students to master as much of the grade level-specific skills as they can—truly master the skills. What I do is I assign to each student the whole class an entire unit. For example, expressions and variables. Then that next day in class, we'll have a class lecture. Students take notes in their math portfolios, and we teach the skill of expressions and variables. Then they dive right into Khan Academy, start the skills in that unit, and work at their own pace.

Those who need extra help have the Khan Academy videos and hints. I also monitor the class, rove around, and help kids whenever they need help. When students master skills on Khan Academy, they're so excited. Their self-pride and self-confidence just overflows, and they start to believe they can learn. It's so important in the learning model that students find out immediately if they are properly grasping a skill. Through Khan Academy, they get that instant feedback after every single problem: is it correct or not correct? If they didn't get it correct, they get to find out immediately from the hints exactly where they might have misunderstood.

It's so important for students in this day and age of technology to learn to communicate and interact interpersonally with others. By using Khan Academy to teach students to support one another, instead of just being locked into a computer screen, they're actually interacting with their neighbors and their friends in class. They learn to interact with others in all of life. So as many good teachers love to do, they take their top successful students and spread them out in the class and give them two elbow buddies, one on each side of them.

I'm monitoring, I'm encouraging first students to help each other. It's so much better when students help each other first because then they become so much more self-sufficient, self-motivated, and self-rewarded. Plus, those peer helpers feel so special as they reward their friends with the help that they give. That really makes it possible to promote and increase teacher-to-student interaction because now the teacher is spending their time where students really truly need the help.

On 32 or more different levels in a class of that many students, I don't have one math class; I have 32 math classes. Every single student is working at their own pace. Now I can meet students where they're at instead of where the middle of the class is at. Because the Khan Academy grade level skills are so well aligned with the Common Core standards for math, I can trust that if my students master those skills before the state test, they will do amazingly well—and they have for years now.

After class, I always make sure to look at the data progress reports on the teacher dashboard. That really helps me know who is succeeding and who is really struggling and needs extra help. Then I set my pace and remediation and instructional support accordingly. There is no way I could have known to that great detail who is really getting it and who's not without the help of Khan Academy.

I love being a teacher because I love it when kids learn to love learning, and when they love learning, they don't need me for the rest of their life. So as they grow up and become adults pursuing their own interests, they've learned how to learn on their own, and they have a passion and desire to...