How to Engage + Motivate Your Students Even When You're Remote!

Thanks everyone for getting started. Hold on one moment and we'll begin in about 10 minutes.

Okay everyone, this is Jeremy Schieffeling with Khan Academy. Thank you so much for your patience getting started this morning or this afternoon, depending on where you're calling in from. It is my extreme privilege to introduce you to Connor Corey, who's one of the most awesome teachers that I've met in a long, long time, and just someone that I wish was teaching my own kids because of the incredible way that he goes about engaging his own students.

So Connor, thank you so much for being with us today and thank you for sharing your expertise with the larger Khan Academy community.

Thank you! It's been great to be here; it’s been a pleasure to be invited in.

Absolutely! Let me see if I can get your webcam set up here. Just go ahead and turn that on if you can.

Alright, we’re in business.

So again, thank you everyone for making time out of your day. I know this is week two for many of us as far as kids running around while we're trying to serve our students. Planners in the same boat, do you have four kids, is that right Connor?

I do! And they are all at home. My wife is distracting them in the other room right now, and so if you hear screaming in the background, that's coming from me.

Well, there you go! That's the secret to being great teachers: having a very supportive spouse. So thank you to her and thank you to your kids for letting us steal you away for about half an hour. But I promise to make it super worthwhile for everyone on the line.

I want to start with a little bit of your background as an educator. Tell us a little bit about, you know, how long you've been teaching, what you've been teaching, the students that you serve, and then we'll go from there.

This is my 17th year teaching. I spent the first 13 years of my career teaching in the Philadelphia school district public schools, and we were on a contract issue for a few years. I went back to school to go into administration, and that's kind of really where I found my love for curriculum and math more than administration. Around my 14th year, I took a job as a math interventionist, which was kind of a new position in Centennial school district, but it was one that I thought was needed.

It was more of...every school has reading specialists most of the time where students are pulled out to rebuild a foundation for literacy, but that foundation for math is sometimes skipped as they go grade to grade. So, for three years I spent pulling students for small group instruction to rebuild their mathematical foundation, and then this year I went back into the classroom to teach middle school math, which is a passion obviously. So I am back as a sixth-grade math teacher this year.

That's awesome! And tell us a little bit about how you've been using Khan Academy.

I've used Khan Academy for about 10 years now. I think it came out of a need more than anything while in Philadelphia, as most of you know large metropolitan school districts were a little bit underfunded. Some of the materials that we needed were not available; the class set of books was of 20 but I had 34 students and they were kind of 10 years old. So you had numerous wonderful pictures drawn in by fifth graders over the 10 years that resembled me sometimes. So we had to find a way. Also, most of my students weren't on level; they were two years below level, maybe some are a little bit advanced, but getting that material became red tape, paperwork of, well maybe you have to fill this out because we're going to see if there's special education.

And it's: "No, they're not special ed; they're just a little behind in fractions, I just need the material." Khan Academy kind of gave me that for free, and I was able to implement almost a centers-based approach like many literacy teachers already do at the elementary level. We kind of rotate our class each day in that way where I may teach one group of 10 students on a third-grade level if we're all working on geometry, and then they'll rotate to work on Khan Academy, and then a project in the third station that has to do with geometry, within the next group maybe fourth grade and fifth grade after that, and kind of try to hit their academic level overall for each of them.

We may not get the third-grade student on a third-grade level to a sixth-grade level that year, but we will rebuild the foundation so the vocabulary makes more sense and they can strive further rather than just kind of skipping along and hope they pick it up.

Very cool! So you’re filling those foundations, kind of like Tim Vandenberg has been talking about in his mastery learning webinar.

Yes, and I share the same belief as Tim most of the time. We did many things of going back to kindergarten and starting all the way over, and it’s doing fantastic!

Very cool! And so, in addition to the academic side, I think one of the things that any follower of your Twitter feed, which I shared in the chat a second ago, will notice is that you really bring this joy and this love of learning to everything you do in the classroom. In normal times, in the best of times, what are some of your most successful engagement techniques for really getting your kids excited about Khan Academy and, more importantly, just learning itself?

I came to the belief a long time ago that all kids, it doesn't matter your background or where you're from, they enjoy kind of embarrassing their teacher. Seeing their teacher look like an idiot doing things that they would not normally be able to do in a school building, and I figured attaching memories like that to my classroom was always the best way.

I think it came about, like it came out 10 years ago, there before all the Fortnite dances and everything like that, there was a dance called the Wu-Tang that all my students would just not stop doing. In the schoolyard if you look down in the schoolyard there are 200 kids in a circle dancing, and one kid, he just walked by the sharpest pencil, he started dancing, and I just like was kidding around and made fun of him like, "That's it? That's all you got? You better practice before you go out to schoolyard!" He started talking trash. He's like, "You can't do it!" I'm like, "You were born in 2004, you don't know anything about Wu-Tang; I got it!" And then they all wanted to see it.

It was okay if you all get to 20, I'll go out in school and do it, and they loved it. They worked so hard those next two weeks or so, and then it kind of spiraled from there. A kid had a water balloon in their desk one day, and I...the many reasons you wouldn't think a kid would have a water balloon in his desk, you almost had to stop and go, "What possessed you to think this is a good idea?"

And then we started talking about, "I'll let you throw water balloons at me if you guys get to 30.” And those kinds of memories, we just started doing crazy stuff. I've worked with unbelievable staff over the years that join in, and we just try to get things that they can't purchase; like it's certificates, but more memories that they want to do.

That's cool! And so, what kinds of results have you got with this approach, like making yourself say, "I'll do whatever it takes to get you to mastery?"

I think you hit almost every angle of your students. You have the introverted students who may not want to say they want to say it, and you have some of your most extroverted students that are the ones screaming and always doing stuff. You're getting all of them to work for a similar goal, which is to embarrass you, or even the other staff members.

We did one you wouldn't believe when I was at Willowdale for three years. I had an unbelievable staff and one time we did a week; it was called the Wheel of Doom and we put all the teachers' names on it, and they basically, whoever won Learnstorm for that month, whoever had the highest growth that class came up. We made an assembly. I had 16 teachers come up front and sit there in chairs, and they would spin this wheel and it would land on ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and they would just get this face and they had a blast while 400 kids were in the audience screaming and excited about math work they’re doing.

I think it was things like that just engaged students more, and whether the learning comes secondary will always come as long as they're excited about something.

I love that! And so, obviously, those are the best of times. Being there physically for the Wheel of Doom, we are far from the best of times right now as we chat. Unfortunately, what are you doing with your students today to drive engagement in this remote learning environment? What would you recommend from that toolbox of best practices for everyone else listening right now?

I mean, I'm always trying new things. I’m attempting to do similar things with just getting the students excited. I think a lot of teachers are starting to run into federal guidelines of online learning; I think that's becoming a struggle. But I've used Flipgrid throughout the year to communicate, and now we're using kind of Zoom meetings to see just to get in touch with your students and do things that are not work that’s required but voluntary for something to do.

Your students miss you; they do! I miss them. Right now, we're doing a TikTok challenge because I know that's everything my students are into right now. So I put out a few assignments on Khan Academy; I said it's voluntary if you would like to join in, tell me! And I put them in a class; I put five assignments up for the week. If they finish those assignments, my daughter and I will do the Flip the Switch challenge for TikTok! And then send it to them through Flipgrid, which send it to them through Zoom or something like that, but just to keep them engaged. I send riddles, math riddles to them through there just to kind of get them through that everything's okay; everything didn't totally stop because I think a lot of kids are scared right now. They're looking at adults for answers and we don't have them. So we're just trying to, I think, all get through this together!

That's cool! So even though it does feel like the world is topsy-turvy, you're still the same Mr. Corey; you're still providing that same level of excitement and motivation even if you can't be with them in person!

We're hoping to—we're going to actually try to get some of the parents involved next week and see if they will participate in the same thing since they're at home with them, and maybe have kids. I think we're going to do a five refrigerate five thing blender. So five things in your fridge you can put in a blender and that parent has to drink it! Try to get the kids involved and parents involved for something fun to do! But there's not new learning going on, but we can all use the review and we just need maybe a couple of laughs throughout it.

Yeah, and that's actually an interesting question! So, like, I think a lot of educators right now are trying to figure out: do I take this time as if it's normal school time, quote unquote, and try to push forward with my content, or do I go into that review mode and sort of keep them stabilizing those foundations, filling those gaps rather than pushing forward? Any thoughts on that sort of conundrum?

I always think right now as a review time. I am looking at it as, yes, I’m teaching sixth-grade students, but they can all review fourth-grade content; things they enjoy doing or something maybe they liked from years in the past. Many times, like in literacy, if a child is constantly reading, you don't care if the book they're reading that they're interested in is below level, but for math there's always this different. We have to push them and push them on grade level and never skip a beat.

I think this is more of a: let's try to have some fun. We don't want to—most parents do not know what slope-intercept form is or how to graph systems of equations. So if you're applying that but you're not able to teach it and you're assigning those things, that becomes a struggle for parents, and I think that's kind of the opposite effect as they're already stressed out enough.

Cool! Well, I love some of the things you've already shared and answered some of the most common questions we've received. So teachers were asking about how do you get students working at the appropriate level for their needs? You were talking about even going back a couple of grades if that's where the gaps are. You can do that with Khan Academy. Teachers were asking about how do you form a virtual sense of community? It sounds like you're doing that by getting all the students working towards a common goal using a platform like Flipgrid to engage not just the students but their parents as well in a really visual and exciting way.

What about this question though? One of the teachers asked, "How can I get kids who don't even engage face-to-face, even in those best of times, to actually engage online when things are way harder?"

I mean, knowing your students is always one of the largest things you have to learn in the beginning of the year. I am always surprised at how some of my introverted students or some of my students that don't engage and raise their hand and answer questions, how well online tools have worked to let me know their understanding without them telling me to gain a perspective of if they're getting a concept that I'm teaching, and Khan Academy has always done that with the assignments and watching them grow where they don’t have to be, you know, maybe they’re a little bit shy and they don’t want to be the one that asked that question that they don’t know what this word means.

But when you see that they're not achieving on something that you know they understand, it could be as simple as just going over next to them and asking them like, "What's wrong here? I don't know" means, and that's a simple fix. But overall to engage them, you see things like Flipgrid; kids love making videos. I have one student who is very shy. He does not talk a lot to—I mean, his friends, he talks to other kids—but won't engage me very much in class. Once we started using Flipgrid, his whole persona changed. When I saw his first video, he was Mr. Stash, and he’s all very outgoing, and this and that.

All the other kids saw it, and they started wanting to be in his group to make the next video, and now he runs Mr. Stash Productions! But he's still that same kid in class that won't raise his hand and won't, like, you know, put himself out there. But as soon as he is able to make these videos, so I found it has an almost opposite effect at times.

Interesting! So maybe that's almost the silver lining of the times we find ourselves in is because it's not all real-time and it's not all live in the classroom, those students who need a little bit more time on their own to process sort of share what they want to communicate now have that time in this asynchronous learning, whether it's creating a Flipgrid video or responding to a Khan assignment on your own time. Students have that space, it sounds like!

Yeah, and I think that's always been a significant advantage with Khan Academy that they have the time to do the assignments again, to try it more than one time, to stop and take a hint or to stop and watch a video, and the whole class isn't waiting for you if you're not getting a concept or you're not moving on with nothing else to do. There's always something that's right at your level that you can kind of take time to reflect and think about.

Very cool! And so, a couple final questions, then we’ll open up for live questions from the audience. How can I help students persist when times are tough? We've talked a lot about growth mindset and about grit in the last couple of years, especially in this moment of crisis. How do we help students get through this?

I mean, I think it's important to realize that we are all going through something right now. This isn't just going to affect small parts of our country or our world. I think just really reaching out to your students, whether it's through a Zoom meeting or just letting them know that you're still there is so hugely important because some—everyone thinks everybody's at home, but many parents are still reporting to work, and some of our medical staff and everything are at work large amounts of the day. Children are still at home; it's by themselves looking for something.

I think it's important to help lead your families and your, as a teacher, in those ways. It's going to be tough, but I think just keeping an open line of communication is the number one thing that we can do as educators right now and allow students to ask questions and allow them to try to persist. Obviously, with growth mindset, we've taught that throughout the year and continuing to do that, but also using a lot of review concepts that are just keeping them going rather than struggling on their own.

That's cool! That's so powerful! I have to give a shout out to...this is Andreessen in South Dakota who sent me a video she created for her fifth-grade class this morning, and she just said the simple words, "I'm thinking about you." I know from my own daughter's experience if you hear that from the most meaningful educator in your life, that's powerful, even when times are tough. So just keeping that line of communication open is so huge!

And then one last question that came up quite a bit was, okay again, we're talking about students who are all sort of facing major challenges; some are facing even bigger ones on top of that. If you want to support your special education students in the middle of this crisis, any words of wisdom for how to serve that audience really, really well?

I think this is an issue that many educators are facing at the moment, and it obviously depends on a child's IEP and some of the federal laws that are coming into play with districts trying to go to virtual learning for the next month and if they're abiding by all of these laws. For myself and my own experience, I have students in my class with IEPs; I have my entire career. I never really change what I'm doing for one specific kid; I change the way I interact with certain students and the materials I give certain students and the way they can kind of participate and how I can highlight them here.

But many of my students that have an IEP, they are perfectly producing in math class. They are participating. I kind of just always, like I would do anything else, I value the student, I know who they are, and I know what kind of pushes them and I try to get into it that way. But right now with students that do have an IEP, I think their districts want teachers to be extremely careful not requiring any work for almost any of their students as a grade until we kind of get some of this figured out. I mean, obviously, we want to make sure we're hitting all our students, but I think our teachers are doing that. I don't know that our teachers are looking and saying, "Well, I can only teach to this group and I can't teach to my other students that may have a learning disability." I think we're just all in it together trying to figure out how we can engage everybody and keep an online classroom going.

Great advice! Let me open up the questions from the audience here. We've got a bunch coming in. I want to start with a great one from Lindsay. So Lindsay says, "Look Connor, this has been awesome, but what kind of goals or targets do you set for your students? Do you focus them on mastering a skill, getting to grade level? How do you keep them from just grinding toward a goal and actually feeling a sense of progress?"

I have used personalized goal setting for now seven years with my students. I believe it's the most effective way and we celebrate that goal setting throughout the process. I have students that are on three years of different levels, so while they would all...they have these little Lego guys that, you know, for mastery on Khan Academy, well we print those out and the kids write their name on them and their goal may say, "I want to get to 45 in third grade."

I sit with that kid and I put it—I hang it up on the wall. The next student, maybe I want to get this 60 on fifth grade, and it's usually about fifteen percent higher than wherever they are. But for the one to move one is fifth grade; it's going to take the same amount of effort for the third one—the student on a third-grade level—to move his score.

So we really focus these goals on the child's current academic level and how much effort it would take them to move up, and the majority of the time those goals are not on grade level. They are a little bit below; some are a little bit above, but anytime a child hits a goal we usually have something. And if you don't have anything, kids love like, "Okay, you can take whatever's in my desk that you find that you want." You'd be surprised at the crap that's in your desk and the things that a kid will take! It'll be a watch that was on the floor two years ago. It will be, you know, stickers for, like, kindergarten that you're like, "Yeah, I shouldn't throw these out," and you just throw them in your desk!

They'll go through your desk, and I think it's the coolest thing ever! We did these—we have these little bracelets I've been doing for years; you can buy hundreds of them for, you know, twenty dollars, and they just—they start to collect different ones every time they set a goal.

But it's small goals over and over and over to eventually get towards mastery. But I think setting grade level mastery for all of your students is just...it's unrealistic! And there's no need to set unrealistic goals for your kids because they're not going to be able to succeed, so what's really the point? If you know them, give them the proper level; let them hit small steps along the way, and they start to develop that growth mindset, and the kids don't really care what level they're learning on!

Yeah, I love how so much of your advice is just rooted in knowing your students. If you know they're going to be motivated by something that's tangible and obtainable, then give them that! Don't try to sort of set the bar way too high and intimidate them; make them feel good about their progress and then they'll want to do it again.

So, many questions are coming in about Flipgrid. They're saying, "What is this Flipgrid? What is it all about?" Can you explain a little bit more there, Connor?

I started Flipgrid; it's an unbelievable—it's a free resource. I started to use it heavily this year. I began last year, but it was the end of the year, a new platform. I'm like, "Okay, maybe next year," I started it. Basically, you create a video for yourself. Yeah, there's the front! You create a video for yourself and for your students, and they're...it's almost like its own social media. That video will go out to your students. Your students are now able to respond to that video, and you could just do a topic such as, "Hey, I just want to say hi to you guys! I want everyone to say hello back; see what you're missing about school."

There are things to help all along the way to get you started, but we've used it heavily for our explaining math this year where we have students create videos on a mathematical topic of order of operations. "Okay, what do we do first?" And they'll make lift different scenes in different movies. Like around Christmas, we did, "What does it mean to have something 20 percent off?" And kids were making their backgrounds of being at a store paying for something that's 20 percent off, but they were able to explain to me what those concepts were about and what—how they apply in the real world, and that gave me more than any test could ever give me! It showed me, well, they're actually understanding each part of this process.

And I think—and you're able to respond to their videos; the other kids in the class can leave what's called a vibe, and they're able to respond, so it forms a sense of community! And then we kind of—we have a mixtape that has all our top videos from all three classes—the best ones—the kids, I mean, we vote on the videos, who came up with the most creative. But it's an unbelievable program, and it's 100 percent free!

I would suggest they check it out. Like everything, just kind of start small; see if you can get things started with Khan Academy. Start small! I think all these platforms for educators and parents, it's kind of like when you get a new phone; you get it and you’re like, "I just want to send the funny picture to my friend; I don't need to sign up for Google Cloud!"

And you're trying to figure it out, but then day after day—literally, a little bit after a little bit—it starts to make sense and become easier, and then you start to see the value of all the things you actually have on your phone. I think if we start technology that way and this online learning platform that's going to continue for the next few weeks, I think that's our best option!

Very cool! And then Denise has a question, which is basically—you mentioned the federal regulations and federal advice that was just coming down. Can you talk a little bit more about that for educators who have not heard about what's being shared at that national level?

At a national level, you have like federal laws that are basically—you have to ensure that every child has the same access to education. And if you're trying to do online learning, there're students that maybe don't have the internet at home or maybe they don't have a device. The only device they have is a parent's phone.

It's going to work! So I think, by districts pushing out a platform of "We're going to continue school without addressing those needs first," and all the needs that are in that child's IEP of differentiated learning—having an aide, having someone else to explain. I think we have a lot of issues where districts are nervous; are they providing for every child?

And that always is the number one thing: you can't exclude a certain amount of children because it's not convenient right now. So there's a lot of—I guess—federal laws that are put in place for a good reason, and now in this unprecedented time, people are like, "I don't know if I can get around this because am I then not educating every child? Am I providing what's been stated by law that I have to do to educate this person?"

But I think the lack of devices and the lack of internet access and different things is a big issue that many people are seeing.

Great! I'm going to throw down the gauntlet for you a little bit here, Connor. I'm going to stretch your engagement abilities. Some high school teachers have been saying, "This is awesome, but awesome for middle schoolers, awesome for elementary students. I've got 11th and 12th graders! How am I going to keep them engaged when they're already so cynical to begin with? On top of that, they have so much else on their shoulders these days?!"

Middle school students are just as cynical! I think high school kids are just like the older middle school kids; they think they're too cool for everything. They think they're just kind of going through the motions, but they're worried about what they look like, what this person thinks, what's going on on social media—they would find it just as funny!

It does—if you did stupid things in your class with them! If you did a TikTok dance with your whole class, if you did certain things that they're interested in and that you find ridiculous, but to them, it's like, "Alright! Well, I have two classes I have homework for; which one am I going to do it for, because I'm not going to do it for both of them?”

So you want to be the teacher that they'll do your homework for you; they'll do, go the extra step for you. And I think, again, it's knowing your students. You may have one class that you could do one thing with, and you may have another class that you can. But it's always just—always be willing to try new things and not embarrass yourself. Nothing's going to change if you continually stay the same, so if you're uncomfortable in what you're doing all the time, I think that's a positive thing!

Yeah! I'll just throw a couple ideas that I've heard recently for the high school set. I know in a lot of ways they face the sort of most daunting challenges because so much of their expected life over the next few months is on hold now, whether it's taking the SAT, taking the APs, graduation, college decisions—all this stuff was supposed to be happening, and now it's frozen! What could you do to fill that void?

Could you host the virtual prom? Could you take a page out of ESPN's playbook? ESPN's doing these senior nights every night on SportsCenter, shouting out the high school seniors who would have been getting fed it otherwise. Could you sort of give it a chance to really let your seniors shine, even during this really difficult moment?

So if there's some way you can bring that sense of normalcy, that sense of tradition into this virtual world, I think you'll be a superstar in their eyes, no matter how cynical they are.

Okay, so let's see here. I think we have time for maybe one or two questions, and so I think the biggest question that I've gotten from a lot of teachers at this point is: how do you ultimately serve students at different levels? Given that everything we've been talking about, in terms of like Zoom or whatever, feels like it's just like okay, one teacher and all the students in a big lecture environment, how do you continue to sort of differentiate and make sure each student feels heard and respected in this time?

I think for the leveling, for myself, I know most of my students' level. I know where I'm kind of teaching them, and whatever topic it is, maybe I assign to my one group of 10 students the remediated foundational skills, and in my higher group maybe the intense word problems.

But those skills all count towards the same thing as our overall goal of this stupid TED Talk video I'm going to create probably today! But having that knowing your students and having them all each doing different things, you're also able, like I said with Flipgrid, give them a chance to ask questions. If you're in a virtual classroom with Zoom and you're saying, “Okay, submit your questions here,” and then you can send that video out just to the students that maybe need a little bit of assistance with that.

But I think it's important to try to recognize all your students too that are working at home that are putting in the extra effort! But really just constant communication is going to be your number one thing to see how kids are doing, to see why maybe these 10 or 15 kids haven't logged on yet or haven't done anything. Is there an issue? Because maybe there is, and as teachers, we're always looking for that to see how we can help in that way.

Cool! Well, I think if anyone wants inspiration as we sign off here, I would strongly encourage you to check out Connor's Twitter feed. He's at twitter.com/corey223 and as you can see here, he's got lots of examples of engaging his students, engaging his own children at home with cool crafts and activities, and just gives you a sense of what's possible with getting students really excited about learning, even in this difficult environment we find ourselves in.

So definitely follow Connor, check out his ideas, and keep your questions coming. And we didn't get a chance to get to everyone; we'll definitely be doing more sessions like this. So if you have other ideas or questions for Connor or for Khan Academy, please submit those in the survey that will follow.

That being said, any last words of wisdom for the audience, Connor?

No! I want to say thank you for tuning in and thank you over at Khan Academy! In the next, you know, few weeks, just enjoy the time with your family. You're not going to be stuck with them this large of a period for many years! I would say just try not to get on each other’s nerves. My wife asked me if I had to chew like that the other day, so I think we've been in close quarters for a while! But just try to enjoy the time; I don't think we're going to get it back. And the more questions you ask about what's going to happen next year with education, the more—the less answers you're going to get! So kind of focus on your family, focus on, you know, your loved ones now and what we can do together.

Cool! Well, I can't think of a better message to end on than that one! So thank you all for making time out of your days. Thank you to Connor for sharing your incredible expertise, and here's wishing you all a wonderful week! Thank you so much!