How to Bring Mastery Learning to Your Class... And Get Results Like Tim's!

Hi everyone! This is Jeremy Schiefling with Khan Academy. I want to thank you for joining us this afternoon or this evening depending on where you're calling in from, and you are in for a very special treat.

So as you probably know, we've been doing webinars every day, twice a day, three times a day here at Khan Academy. But I have to confess, I have never seen a session like the one that Tim led a couple of weeks ago, where he basically blew minds all across the country by talking about the results he got with mastery learning in his classroom. So much so that Tim has gone on to chat with Sal Khan directly and will actually be on Sal Khan's live stream next week if you've been tuning into that.

But if you want a sneak preview into what he and Sal are going to talk about, you've come to the right place. In fact, this is way more than a sneak preview. Thanks to the generosity of Tim, we're going to get a deep dive into everything he does in his classroom, the actual use of Khan Academy, his grade book, and all that good detail so you can apply the same in your own classroom either tomorrow or even next fall if you're already thinking about that.

That being said, Tim has asked to run a couple of polls just to get started. We'd love to get a sense of the folks in the room right now. So did you see Tim's original webinar a couple of weeks ago where he sort of laid out his experience with mastery learning and the results he was getting? It looks like with about two-thirds of the votes coming in to him, there’s actually a huge chunk of new fans here, more than three-quarters actually, so definitely a lot of folks who could use a little bit of a refresher.

Okay, and then just to help him out as well, tell us what grade level you teach. That'll sort of help us tailor, obviously, Tim is coming at this from a sixth grade perspective, but he'll make sure to speak to the realities of other grade levels as well. Thanks everyone for participating so quickly, that's awesome. Go ahead and share those results.

So, see, lots of fellow elementary school folks, but definitely a nice mix of folks all the way up to the college level, in fact. So lots of hunger for the kinds of things you're sharing. That being said, Tim, I'm gonna basically turn it over to you because you've again been so generous with your time and your expertise to put together a whole another slide deck for us, which also, by the way, is attached in the handout section and will be emailed to you along with the recording. Tim is going to spend about 30 minutes walking through all this, and then we're going to take your questions live from the audience.

So Tim, thank you again. Take it away!

Okay, well since there was a good chunk of the live audience who have not seen the original webinar, let me first highly recommend that you go back and watch that. But I will go a little bit slower than anticipated on the initial review material so that you're caught up to speed.

So, let's see, do I have my screen showing correctly? I'm gonna check it. Clear the slides are correct. Okay, good.

Okay, so mastery learning with Khan Academy and how to achieve massive results. So just off the bat, I want you to know that as a sixth-grade teacher in a low-income area in the high desert area of California, halfway between LA, my kids are like most kids in America. They're not coming from affluent homes.

Ten of them come to me at grade level, 90 below grade level, half of them far below, and nearly all of my students are reading two or more years below grade level when they come to me. Comparing my class, this is my class down here, I'm comparing my class with the state of California and the county I teach in and the district I teach in. You can see where my students are relative to all those. This is a passing grade in fifth grade and then sixth grade, normalizing the scores, you can compare apples to apples of growth.

My students were a good about 20 points below the average California student, which is still really far below. We'll talk about more of this later, but I want you to see my kids are not at grade level, so much like most of your students as well.

In September 2016, I watched a TED Talk from Sal, and you really need to go watch this TED Talk. I think it's around the 4 minute 30 second mark somewhere in there. Sal gives a powerful analogy of education under the old school model. It's kind of like this: imagine building a building like a two or three story building or even taller and giving, instead of a fixed expectation of the building being safe and solid and firmly on a great foundation, instead basing your building on a timeline.

Saying, for example, “Alright, you have two weeks to build a foundation, do what you can.” And two weeks later the building inspector comes and he says, “Well, you got some wet cement over here, you don't have some foundational posts over there, that's pretty good, you got an 80, build the next level.”

Well, everybody knows in their right mind if you keep up with that analogy from first floor to second floor to third floor, eventually the building is gonna crumble. That’s exactly like the way we run education in America. We say, “Okay, you’ve got nine months, so do what you can,” and we don’t have time to go back and fix the foundation of the years before these kids come to us.

We just have to teach to the current grade level standards and they get what they get, and you pass them on and you give them a good grade if they try hard, but really did they pass a state test? Probably not.

So the big takeaway from Sal's talks is this idea of mastery learning. If you see that at the bottom there, mastery learning is a different mindset. It’s developing each skill to fluency and long-term retention, where the fixed variable is mastery rather than the time allotted. You say, “Okay, I don’t care how long it takes you to learn, let’s say, solving single variable equations, but you’re going to master this before the state test.”

You might take longer than most kids, you might learn it after the quiz we take, but you’re going to learn this. And that’s the expectation versus “You got a week and if you don’t learn it too bad, we’re moving on. Your grade’s stuck for that assignment, that skill.”

Mastery learning is a different mindset. We’ll talk more about that later.

So I decided after watching that video from Sal that I was totally done with building on these dangerous foundations of unstable mathematical concepts. These kids just didn’t grasp what the meaning of numbers were, place value, fractions, what equations are, and why we're subtracting or adding to both sides at the same time.

They just think that math is just about memorizing algorithms as opposed to truly understanding what’s going on. So I decided that from now on I'm going to teach students with a solid foundation, and Khan Academy was going to help me make that happen.

So in the fall of 2016, I chose three years ago, now four school years ago pretty much, to take my kids back to kindergarten. We're going to go back to kindergarten with the help of Khan Academy and master all these skills so that we have a solid foundation to build on.

So beautifully, Khan Academy has all these different grade level courses, so I assigned K through five in addition to my sixth-grade standards that my sixth graders were supposed to learn, and I expected them to master everything.

Let’s see what happened.

So after three school years of doing this, each of the past three school years, my sixth graders have grown. Their results have looked like this: you see that little dot on the left, Vandenberg 18/19, 60 points below. If you look at California, I picked the best growth for California students, the largest educational market in the nation, the best growth of the last three years cohort growth. They grew that year, 2017/18 school year: they grew 1.2 points towards a passing score.

Now, even just a flat year of growth is good. That means you gave them a year harder test and they stayed at the same level, so you kept them where they were by teaching them a whole year’s worth of material. They stayed about where they were; so even just flat growth is good.

Well, here’s what happened with my kids. After using this mastery learning model, going back and filling in the gaps, we went from 60 points below to 34 points above. All told, it's about 94 to 95 points of growth on average for every student in my class. Every kid went up!

The one kid who went up the most, he went up 193 points. He was an IEP special ed kid, one of the most, you know, sweet boys but one of the most hyperactive ADHD boys that I’ve ever had in 25 years of teaching. He grew immensely thanks to Khan Academy, and so did the whole rest of the class.

These are the kids and their lives were changed forever. This is real! You know, if those kids look like your kids, you know just your normal average American student, well there you go. That’s them just like your class. If they can do it, so can your kids too!

So how do you make this happen? First, I highly recommend—now this is new material from here on out for those of you who've watched the former webinar—we're going to deep dive into my brief points on the first webinar.

First, familiarize yourself with what mastery learning actually is. Mastery learning. Watch these two videos and the one linked up above in the slide deck above—those three videos from Sal Khan himself where he explains what mastery learning is.

Really wrap your mind around that. A lot of the questions I've received in the last three weeks, about half of them have come to me from teachers I can tell. They really haven't quite grasped what mastery learning is. They still want to teach under the old model and, you know, bless them for wanting to reach out and try some new tricks that might work.

But if you really want huge growth, you really gotta accept and deep dive into this mastery learning model. If you want to see what this looks like in a classroom, in fact, in my classroom, that's the video linked there. Then you can watch my earlier webinar right there on that link, so you can see all that from the first go-round we had.

So moving on, here are some best practices for mastery learning. First, some disclaimers: every classroom and school and district situation is different. You need to adjust and make this work for your students; there’s no one-size-fits-all. You need to use your professional judgment.

You still need to follow whatever rules and expectations from your department, your grade level team, your administrators, your district. At the same time, it certainly helped when I went to my principal and I asked permission to try something vastly different, and he gave me permission to try just one year. If my state test results went up, and he let me keep doing it, and that’s exactly what happened.

Number two disclaimer: This is a major paradigm shift from the traditional time-driven learning model to the mastery-driven learning model. You need to think differently. You need to think differently from, “Okay, I’m going to teach it, now we’re going to do some practice homework, and I’m going to give a quiz and whatever grade they got, that’s it we’re moving on.” This is a different mindset where kids can still go back in and continue to master skills while still keeping up with the class on the new stuff, and grades are never solid until report cards come out. That’s when grades are locked in.

Number three disclaimer: For many, if not most, students in America and in the world, really, this is a matter of educational life and death. Are you willing to treat it as such or are you just going to stick with the epically failed time-driven status quo? You’ve got to decide.

Look, you might be the last chance your students ever have. You might be the only teacher in their whole K-12 educational life who will say, “You know what, enough is enough! I’m going to make sure my kids get the foundation they need.”

Maybe for high school teachers, you’re going to make them do early math, arithmetic and pre-algebra. Elementary teachers, early math and arithmetic only in addition to your current grade level material. But you’ve got to decide, “Hey, am I going to change their life or are they just going to continue to pretend they’re passing classes because they try hard, but they never really master it? They fail the state test every year. Their learning is fake; we’re lying to parents about their grades.”

An A is not real. An A just means they’re nice, well-behaved and work hard on homework and class work, and I give them an A and I move them on even though they just failed the state test. Are you gonna just say, “The buck stops here,” I’m gonna make a difference, we’re gonna do something different and change these kids' lives?

So I hope you join me in that adventure, but that’s up to you. Make sure you get permission from administrators or your department team or whatever you need, so that you’re not in trouble for doing what I believe is morally and ethically right for all kids.

Alright, so here are some tips getting more in detail. These main points one through the first nine of these are from the original webinar, but the details underneath are new for people to see, so we’ll look at these in detail slowly.

So here we go. Pardon me.

So number one: Be honest and face the state test facts. Where are your students actually at? Look at their state test scores from the year before or whatever district diagnostic tests or anything that’ll show the real truth of how they compare, compared to state expectations and national norms and so on. Where are they really at?

If their previous year teachers said they got an A or a B, that might mean they’re a good student, but that doesn’t mean they mastered the skills from the previous year. How many times have you told yourself, “What were they teaching them the year before?” And I guarantee you that that teacher the year before was thinking the same thing in August, September, at the start of the year too.

And so on and so on all the way down to kindergarten. “What were they teaching them in preschool?” And preschool saying, “What were they teaching them at home?”

So that’s not your business. What is your business is where are they at right now? So I highly recommend that you focus on your students’ actual cohort growth history. Where are they growing, and how did your students you just graduated the year before grow?

Before I got to tell you, I also taught high school and junior high, not just sixth grade, even though the bulk of my 25 years was sixth grade. Even Jeremy doesn’t know this. For six years, I was an adjunct professor at the University of Redlands in California—a teacher credential program. I work with student teachers as their, once a week, symposium teacher as they check in during their hardest semester of their teaching life. It’s called student teaching—we’ve all been through that.

So I’ve seen it all! We all know about high school teachers, junior high teachers, elementary teachers who might be very proud of their state test scores. You know, maybe their kids’ average scores in their class were at grade level, but if you look at their growth, they might have actually gone down.

Maybe they came to them at an advanced, above grade level score, but by the time they graduated them, their scores actually went down. They might still be at grade level, but they didn’t actually keep them level or bring them up, which to me is what a successful teacher is.

So look at that growth history and be honest with yourself about that. When I saw that, I said, I need to do something different because it’s not working. So focus on growth—not the final scores. And then finally, if possible, discuss the growth data with your team, your department, administration, and most importantly, parents and students.

Show: I highly recommend this. This is what I do at back-to-school night and parent-teacher conferences. Show the whole class results and then provide individual student results individually. I’m not going to show any individual scores, but I have loaded up what I showed at the start of this school year.

Jeremy, are you able to see this?

Yep, it’s coming through.

Okay, so this is what I showed at the start of last school—it was this school year. This is my previous school year’s kids—the same kids you just saw in that chart where they grew a lot. This is basically almost the same scores. Every year they come to me.

The previous year, this is what they look like—about three kids at grade level. That’s this, in the green here. Nobody at advanced, above grade level. I’d sure would like to be one of those teachers that gets a population up here and a bunch of kids down here above the grade level. This is a typical report for my district on how kids did on state tests the year before.

Then this is where most of my kids are now. They call this a nice word. They call this standards nearly met. But if green level three means at grade level, what do you call yellow level two? That means not at grade level. To me, that means they failed the previous year—in my case, they failed fifth grade.

Here’s the kids: the biggest chunk of my kids are far below grade level, far below. And I can’t tell you how many of these kids got A’s and B’s from their teachers in fifth grade because they worked hard. They were nice; they did their best, and they got an A or a B. And their parents come to me and say, “My child never got less than an A or never got less than a B on their report cards in math, so what are you going to do with my kid this year?”

Well, I show them the reality. You need to show your parents the reality. This is reality! Do you want me to give your child an A when they failed the grade level, or do you want me to be honest with you and do something differently to make a difference?

Besides parents, this is what happened. What I do is show them all these. These are failing scores in each domain: concepts, procedures, problem-solving, modeling, data communicating, reasoning. Orange is failing like far below, and the gray is could be at, could be below—it's like near grade level. The light blue is like advanced—not so good.

This is reality! You need to show your parents, your administrators, your team, reality and have a reality check with them. But then show them what happens with the growth. If you do this for one year, show them the growth. So I show them before, and then here comes the after. Ready for this? Boom!

Those are the exact same kids leveled up—those 90 or so points. Yeah, there’s one kid still down here in the red, but I’ll tell you this: this kid actually went up like 100 points!

All those kids that were in the red moved up to yellow, and all those kids that were in the yellow moved up to green, and all these advanced kids moved up. This is real, and look at all these domain scores. Look at all these advanced, and all this orange like almost went away. This is real growth.

When I had success the very first year, this is what I do. I show the next year’s parents, “Here’s the before, and your kids, by the way, are just like this. And if you want the after, I can make this happen if you want it.”

So show that data and be—and until then, until you have some data to show that to administrators, talk to them about where they’re really at and why are we keep beating a dead horse and being like that fly hitting their head against the window thinking they’ll eventually get through?

You got to do something different! The definition of insanity is continuing to do what fails over and over that people say, expecting it to change. So quit the insanity and do something different.

So be honest with the state test results. So back to our presentation, I think it’s this over here.

Okay, so show them all that.

Next, number two: Acknowledge that math is cumulative. Prerequisite skills are exactly that—pre-required, not pre-suggested! You can’t teach kids how to multiply, divide out, or subtract fractions and mixed numbers unless they even understand what a fraction is.

And they can’t even figure that out until they understand the meaning of numbers and number sense and place value and all of that. They need to master those skills, otherwise they will continue for the rest of their lives until they choose to quit school or think that they’re dumb when they’re not. They’re just going to think the school math is all about algorithms—memorizing algorithms and having no clue what it all means.

So get away from memorizing algorithms; focus on meaning and understanding what’s really going on by going back, even back to kindergarten, and having them master those prerequisite skills and number sense concepts.

Number three: In order to do that, use Khan Academy to remediate and fill in foundational gaps by assigning remedial course mastery expectations. I assign early math, or you can individually sign K, 1, 2, 3, whatever grade levels are below you.

Also, the arithmetic course covers, I would say kindergarten through seventh grade arithmetic, dealing with positive and negative integers, add, subtract, multiply, divide and order of operations. A little bit gets into seventh grade as well, so that's a good review for junior high and high school teachers.

Then the pre-algebra course is an excellent review for secondary teachers teaching above pre-algebra. So that's an excellent review.

Next, teach! You're still teaching. You don’t just say, “Alright everybody, go on Khan and figure it out yourself.” You still teach the grade level common core standards to mastery. Don’t just cover the standards—master them! Expect mastery.

Number five: Believe that every child can learn. It’s called growth mindset. So what you should do is you should assign, like, the first week of school—and I know it’s kind of late now—but you can still assign this to your kids now. Change their lives now. Don’t wait until the fall.

Assign this remotely, as we’re all doing remote learning, the growth mindset lessons on Khan Academy. Tell your kids to get on there. Tell them it’s extra credit. Tell them it’ll change their lives. It’s totally worth it!

If you haven’t done it already, go to Khan Academy. Let me pull up that tab.

Okay, up here in the courses tab, over here in College, Careers and More, is this growth mindset course. Assign that to your kids. It’s amazing! The videos are amazing! Do them together as a class. Talk about them, do the activities—it’s fantastic. So definitely be doing that.

Okay, and then back to the presentation.

Okay, growth mindset, also part of growth mindset: really emphasize and teach the value of error analysis. Learn from mistakes. Mistakes are good! The quickest, most—the fastest growth that kids make is when they stop and learn from mistakes.

Okay, what did I do wrong? And that’s where the growing is the most powerful and sticks with them the longest. And the growth mindset videos and lessons talk about that, so make sure you do that.

Number six: Teach, support, teach, support. You’re really teaching, but then you support them. You let them use Khan Academy, which gives instant feedback after every question. Did they get it? Did they understand it or not?

Then allow, let go, and allow them to have self-agency and initiative—let them own it!

So let me go back in Khan Academy up here.

Okay, so over here on progress—if you go to your progress tab, I have assigned the sixth grade and several other courses. Now, this is my current class. I’ve changed their names to just two letters, first and last name of each, so you don’t know who’s a little, you know, privacy there for them.

But this is my class progress, and these low performers down here—these are special ed kids, and they’re actually mastering their lower grade materials for the first time in their life!

So I’m still proud of them; they’re still going to have huge growth on the state test from where they were last year. Even this kid here, who’s at 38 mastery for sixth grade on our practice state test, practices; he is crushing the practice state test with above grade level scores on half of the practice test and at grade level scores for the other half.

He’s doing great and so are all the other kids doing the best that they’ve ever done in their whole lives! The Khan Academy research, which I leaned on before I ever began this, says that if kids master 40% or more of their current grade level standards, they will outperform their non-Khan Academy peers that don’t use Khan Academy by about 50% on their state tests.

Kids who master 60% from here and above will outperform by 80%. I’m pretty sure, maybe, Jeremy afterwards can link the Khan Academy page that shows that bar graph growth compared to non-Khan using kids.

So I just want you to know—you might think, well we’re almost done with the school year. Why aren’t more of your kids, Tim, further along? I trust this! This is real learning, not, I covered it and I failed the test.

These kids actually mastered this, and these kids—all these kids at 60%, approximately, 60 or higher, I anticipate them achieving advanced, above grade level, that level one on that chart, or at grade level, but definitely at grade level or above.

So they’re going to do great! But then I use these charts.

Going back into teach, support, teach, support—what I do is I go into the unit, the grade level unit that we’re teaching. I still teach. So let’s say, here’s the unit—we actually haven’t even covered yet. Check this out—we have not even taught this unit at all yet, but because my students have—I’ve allowed them to have initiative and self-agency and the ability to move forward without me even teaching the unit, a third of my class is already halfway done with the whole unit.

Then another third is a quarter done or more, and then these are the kids that are, you know, low and struggling, and they’re not to this yet, but when I get around to teaching this unit next, if we do come back from the whole remote learning thing that we’re all going through right now.

When I do teach this unit, I’ve already got half to two-thirds of my class seated with pre-knowledge about what is going on. Let’s say—I’ll just say, I want to teach how to calculate the mean, so here, 17 kids still haven’t gotten to proficient or familiar with that.

So, calculate the mean! I will teach this skill and probably the next skill, the median, and probably this and this—these I’ll probably teach three or four skills at once, three or four skills together, over a good hour.

Then I’ll let them loose, like, “Okay, now you all go do it!” I bet you can do it just like we did together as a class. I’ll use my own computer as like a student, and we do some problems together as a class.

Then I literally put this up on the big screen, and they would actually see their names, but I’m not letting you see their names. I’ll say, “Okay, you want to go to recess? You need to at least get to familiar—to this level—before recess.”

And you got 30 minutes before recess! I bet you can get to familiar, especially since I'm here to help you. Your neighbors are here to help you; the Khan videos and the Khan hints are all here to help you.

As long as kids work hard and do their best and reach out for help and persist and show grit and show growth mindset, I let them all go to recess. The ones that are, you know, there’s always kids that choose not to work, and I hold them in.

Now, you as a high school teacher, junior high teacher, you’ve got different privileges, you know, or powers that you can have over them, but that’s what I do.

Or I might say, “Okay, by tomorrow, you need to all be over here at proficient or, you know, let’s see, what do we call this? Proficient! Or try to be mastered by taking a unit exam.”

So that’s what I do. I teach and then I monitor this. I’ll even put this on the big screen in my classroom. I’ll project this whole screen and we—I’ve trained them as a class.

I say, “Okay class, now here you see names where you are in this chart has nothing to do with how smart you are. This is all about just where you’re at right now.”

So let’s all work together as a team and get up here to proficient! Let’s work together as a team! You kids who become proficient or mastered, you’re now the designated peer tutors. Reach out to your table members who are down here who are still struggling and help them out.

And all get big team points or class points so we can get everybody moved up.

Or I’ll let these kids go to recess early or whatever. So motivate kids like that and then also show the growth charts.

Okay, and just set a class culture of we’re here to support each other and everybody who works hard is rewarded. Even if you can’t get up to proficient or familiar, if you work hard and reach out for help—hey, you’re moving on! You’re getting all the privileges everybody else gets, but I need to see it!

I need to see the effort and the belief that you can learn by putting in the effort and sweat equity.

Now back at the sixth grade progress as I teach, I’m monitoring this chart and I’ll show the class. I’ll say, “Okay class, the median and we learn what median means early on in the year—the middle kid in the class is right here. Are you above or below? And can you catch them if you're down here?”

And so I’ll do that or I might also say, “Hey, so-and-so, this kid right here. Did you know that your friend is only one percent ahead of you? I bet if you work hard tonight, you can catch them up. In fact, I’ll pay you class cash or a raffle ticket or some kind of class reward if you can catch them up.

Then this kid’s like, “Oh no, I don’t want that to happen. I’m gonna, I’m not gonna let you beat me.”

So I have individual 1v1 competitions as well, using this data. But it’s always a class environment of supporting and encouraging, and you’ve got to set that tone.

We are here to help each other, and you praise the kids who grow a lot and move up. And every kid can do it, and we really believe in that, especially at the unit level.

They’ll see bigger growth on the unit level when you click on by unit. For example, that unit that I haven’t even taught yet, they’ll see growth more rapid because within a unit it’s less material, so their growth happens more quickly.

Okay, back to the presentation. I just wanted you to see that while I teach, I then can use this data to know who I need to go help, who is struggling, and who needs assistance. So back to the presentation.

So teach, support, but allow them to work on their own. You saw the results of that. It’s like half the class has already learned a whole chunk of that unit that I haven’t even taught yet! So make it real; let them have some independence.

Next, motivate, encourage, praise, reward, and celebrate. What I do at the start of the year, I really, really get them excited about growth and really believing that they can do it so I emphasize the mastery of the lower grade level skills. K-12, these kids are like, “I can do this! I’m a sixth grader!”

And they might secretly struggle with some skills like, “Mr. Vandenberg, I forgot what a rhombus is. Can you tell me what that is?” Or they might not have ever truly had the chance to learn or master what some of these number sense skills are.

Did you know they start in Common Core? They start learning about distributive property concepts pretty early, so really have them go through those foundational skills.

But they basically build confidence and velocity by focusing on lower grade level review remediation standards. They’re like, “Oh, I can do this! Look, I now know how to look at the hints to quickly learn how to do it! It’s easy! It’s first grade! It’s kindergarten! I can do this!”

And so they learn how the system works, while it’s still easy, while secretly they might come across something they struggle with. And they’re like, “Okay, I need to slow down, learn this, get help from my teacher.”

While they’re doing this, their self-pride will skyrocket as students build confidence and self-agency through grit and determination utilizing help resources as needed—the videos, the hints, their peer buddies, and you, the teacher, and even parents and older siblings at home.

Next part of this motivation piece: Use those remedial courses. As they do the remedial courses, have them begin with the course challenges because they supposedly have already covered this before then. Supposedly they should be able to do it!

So say, “Hey, start at the end! Do the course challenge and the unit tests a few times, and what that will do, it will quickly bring them up in their skill mastery a lot faster than if they went skill by skill through all the lessons. It’s a really rapid advancement!”

And then what they did not answer correctly, then they can go in individually and work on those skills. Have them do those course challenges! It’s kind of like a final exam, an end of year test.

And also, the unit tests a few times each. But be aware, after so many times some of the questions do start to recycle. So you don’t want kids doing that too many times, and you’ll have to use your judgment where the questions start to recycle.

They’re just memorizing answers, copying answers down, and reusing them. So I only let them do them a few times—maybe five times or so. Right around 10 times I think questions start to recycle.

Somebody who’s an expert will have to inform me on that.

So, and then, also at the start of the year, I focus on time on task. Like the first week of school, I’ll say, “Hey guys, guess what? I can see how hard you’re working! So like, for example, I go back up to this excellent feature called activity overview—this is set up for the window of this semester. Grades finished for first semester on December 16th.

So ever since then, this is their work since then."

So what I might do, I might set this to just the last day or two, and then I’ll sort by most minutes on task and I’ll reward, I’ll say, “Okay kids, I will reward the top ten kids who work the most tonight. Now your required homework is only 30 minutes tonight but if you do more than that, and you’re one of the top ten, boy, I’m gonna award you big class cash or big team points or some privilege or some reward or something like that.”

So they get hooked on the successes of burning through quickly those early grade level skills and really mastering them.

Next, after a while, after a few weeks of that, I phase out of focusing on minutes on task because you can fake the minutes on task. By just leaving the screen open, smart kids can start to figure that out.

Then I started focusing instead on skills leveled up, and I’ll say, “Okay, the top ten kids who level up the most skills tonight for homework, I’m going to give them big rewards!”

So make sure you’re focusing on skills leveled up. So that’s one way I really motivate the kids. I might set them individual rewards or team rewards or class rewards for all that.

Okay, back to presentation, so that’s what this is all about. And so as you teach them to rely on those videos, hints, elbow buddies, and you, next, praise and reward individual team and whole class effort and progress.

Educational research has shown that kids need three levels of motivation. Usually, your higher achieving kids, what works with them the best is individual motivation, individual rewards. Your average achieving kids need more like small group rewards like a team or a table group or maybe a class.

Versus a class, if you’re a high school junior teacher, period versus period. And then, the lower kids, they need more whole class where they can blend in and work as a whole giant team because they know they can still chip in and not be singled out.

They might be embarrassed if their growth is shown, but boy if they chip in and help the whole class achieve, then they will definitely help make a big difference and their growth will still go up without any individual focus on them.

So that’s basically, that was life-changing for me when I learned that decades ago about motivating kids on those three levels: individual, team, and whole class.

So reward and praise accordingly. Next, here’s some ideas to do all that. Khan Academy has some free certificates you can download. Jeremy can give you the link for that.

Class cash—that’s what I use—or raffle tickets, or homework heroes, or team points, or class-wide challenges, or like I was saying earlier, 1v1 skill mastery challenges. Pit friends against friends, who can—who can, you know, I bet you can catch up to your buddy this week or tonight or in this class period if you work hard.

Or who can level up the most skills today, just today only!

And I like to show unit and skill progress charts live—all with the culture of we are all here to support each other and everybody who works hard. I don’t care how low your progress is, as long as you work hard, you will be praised and rewarded.

Okay, another way to motivate: use grades. Khan Academy should be used for grades. In fact, I trust Khan Academy better than most assignment assessments by far based on mastery. And for me, a grade is never locked in. A grade can go up if they keep leveling up their mastery for a course, or a grade can go down until report cards.

Once report cards happen, their grade is locked in!

Especially semester report cards, grades are locked in. But by the end of the year, they can keep working. Right now, as we’re remote learning—even though work is not required, because of the remote learning equity concerns, the kids can still optionally keep working, and they are!

They’re leveling up their skills. I’ve had kids who’ve worked hours and hours leveling up skills while they’re at home on their Chromebooks, working on their skills.

Here’s a pro tip that I suggest you do, and what works best for you, but I highly recommend that you use Khan Academy assignments for grades. The assignments—there's a really fantastic feature called assignments where you can assign specific skills to kids and are super powerful for seeing how the kids are doing.

And because it'll tell you how the whole class did on every single question, it is super powerful, but I highly recommend you use that for grades sparingly.

Unless you’re one of those teachers who have all the time in the world to enter assignment grades—individual assignment grades into your grade book and keep them updated regularly.

So let’s say they got a 67 on one of the assignments you give them. Is that locked in forever? What about growth mindset and mastery learning? What if they learn that skill later in the year and they redo the assignment and they get 100 on it? You going to go back and change it?

Well, I don’t have time for all that! So I do use the assignments feature to signal the kids what I want them to work on and also if I just want to get a pulse on how well they're learning as a class and what specific kinds of questions I need to reteach.

But I don’t use assignments for grades barely ever. Instead let me show you my assignment book. Hopefully, my grade book did not... oh good.

Alright, so this is my grade book. I slid it over so you cannot see the names of the kids, but this is my grades. Here’s early math, and you can see at the bottom of that black box it says this assignment is weighted 0.333.

So one-third of the value of this of my regular sixth-grade assignment, early—one-third grade that’s half the value because three is half of six. Sixth grade and arithmetic, those are full value.

Notice that’s out of 100 points! I just go in every two or three weeks into their Khan Academy progress scores on the progress tab that you already saw, and I just update this.

I say, “Okay, based on the progress chart.” So let’s say we’re talking—let’s see here. Let’s say it’s week five of the school year. They should have, let’s say you assign kindergarten, first, second, third, fourth, all those to your kids.

They should have 100% of kindergarten mastered, 100% at first, 100% of second, 63% of third, 31% of fourth, and 16% of fifth and sixth in arithmetic should be mastered by now by the week that ends on September 13th.

So that’s what I make it in my grade book. I make the sixth-grade course out of sixteen points, and if they passed that, great! They have over 100 on that. If they’re less than 16, then it’ll mark it accordingly.

I keep typing that in and keep updating that. And as the weeks go on, I change what it's out of. And eventually, this is my pacing guide. Some of you have already seen this, and it’ll be linked.

It is linked, Jeremy will make sure it’s linked somewhere after this presentation. By spring break, everything is done, everything should be 100!

And that’s where we are. We’re at spring break, so back to the grade book—here it is! So by now, everything should be 100, and just a couple hours ago, I went in and I updated grades based on what kids have been doing on remote learning.

And this is how they’re doing—how much they’ve mastered of the whole grade level, and I just keep updating that every two or three weeks. So I’m only changing these grades two or three times, maybe twice a month at most.

This is math facts; I use a separate third-party math facts program, add, subtract, multiply, divide, fraction, decimal, percent conversions, things like that. And then I also grade effort, and we’ll—that’s in a slideshow in a second, but I may as well talk about it right now.

I give an effort grade, and it’s based on how hard the class is working. I basically take the top ten kids, and basically, the tenth kid in the class has worked this semester since December 16th, 3000 minutes on task!

So I make it out of 300, and then move the decimal place over, so all these kids with 300 points, they have an effort grade of basically 300 out of 300, 100!

Anybody with less than that because they’re not going home and doing their homework or not working in class like they should, it’s less than 300. But this is just a little grade to buffer because look, I make it say this assignment at the bottom of that black box, this assignment is weighted at 0.1% of its value, so it’s really a 30-point assignment, but it’s a nice little buffer to reward those kids who are working hard.

And the kids like this one who are really smart, look at this great scores mastering most of the material fantastically, but that student’s not trying so hard, they really should be trying hard.

So it kind of lowers their grade a little bit for effort. So that’s still part of the grade.

So okay, back to the presentation. So that’s how I do grades, but I do recommend using the assignments sparingly. But you do what works for you, but make sure you follow the mastery learning model if you want to be able to do all this.

Next, let effort count. We just talked about that, okay? But watch out for grade inflation.

I have taught high school and junior high. I have tutored dozens and dozens of high school and junior high and college students and I know how some secondary teachers inflate grades by knowing their kids will fail the state test.

But boy, if they work hard on their homework and they’re nice in class and try hard in class, boy, I’ll give them an A because they did their homework, even though all their homework is wrong! Well, I don’t give grades like that.

I’ll get a little bit of an effort grade that’ll raise them up a little bit for their effort, which Khan Academy measures for you beautifully and easily. But make sure it’s balanced.

So the kids who work hard but don’t learn a material—they’re not just getting an A. An A should mean they’re mastering the material at least proficient or better.

So you balance it out so it’s just right, so the real learning is really happening.

Letter G: Use non-con assessment scores to verify learning and to disincentivize cheating. What do I mean by that? So back to the grade book, over here you’ll see some other grades.

This is common formative assessments that my grade level does. Some of you knew about PLCs—professional learning communities—we have common informative assessments, and we’ve been doing practice state tests, the interim assessment block tests they call them in California.

These are like real practice state unit tests, and I use those—but I balance them out so that it does not skew the scores.

So this way, if the kid is proving that they’re learning on third-party assessments, they’re still going to do great on the test. Make sure these other assessments, quizzes, and tests are rigorous and truly match the state standards and the rigorousness.

But also, you give enough weight and value to mastering skills on Khan Academy that they’re still passing your class with a great grade, but make sure their learning is real.

This is what I mean by avoid cheating, disincentivize cheating.

Have you ever had kids cheat? Has that ever happened? I know with any sort of teaching, cheating can happen! Well, on Khan Academy, kids can open up a new tab and go to Google calculator and type in the problem on a calculator or use their calculator they have in their desk and do the work without doing it for real.

Now Khan Academy sometimes does give a calculator, and they should use that, just like a state test would do. That too, at least in California.

But if they’re doing superb on their Khan Academy mastery but they fail my third-party non-Khan Academy assessments, I become highly suspicious of their learning over on Khan.

And if a kid fails a quiz or test and they claim their Khan data shows that they were mastering it, I say, “Okay, tell you what—do that unit test on Khan and I'm watching you. I'm gonna make sure that you're not using a calculator. Go ahead, get started.”

Then they might say, “Oh well, you know, I forgot how to do it.” Well then you never learned it to begin with because Khan mastery is all about long-term learning!

That’s why it’s designed, so you discover the cheaters real quick that way.

Another form of cheating is your peer tutor buddies. I really have to train the class, make sure that peer tutors are—when they’re helping their friends—make sure that the hints are showing because when you click hints, open Khan Academy will not give credit for that question being answered.

So make sure the hints are showing, then I allow their friends to help all they want! Because the hints are showing that means that won’t get credit for answering right!

So they can discuss it with them and talk them through the problem step by step. No big deal! But if the hints are not showing, then they’re cheating because they’re going to get how to do it and get the answer and Khan will think they knew how to do it on their own.

So make sure that’s going on.

Okay, back to the slideshow.

Okay, non-con assessments: letter H, keep intrinsic and extrinsic motivation balanced. Emphasizing intrinsic motivation—that self pride and self-worth is just amazing! It totally skyrockets!

But remember, most teachers don’t teach for free. So some extrinsic reward is okay!

Hey, I still need a paycheck to, you know, take care of my family even though I would teach for free if I could, but I still need a paycheck.

Well our kids, some of them, it’s okay to get class cash or homework passes or special rewards or privileges or whatever extrinsic rewards you want to give with the balance of the major focus is intrinsic reward—believing that they can do it!

Moving on, number 10: Release control. Give your kids independence! Once you’ve taught several skills or whatever skill you just taught, let them go. Allow for personalized variable pace while setting high expectations toward proficiency and mastery, and trust that the learning is real!

And you got to make sure they’re not cheating, but make sure that they’re really doing it on their own at their own pace while you’re supporting them and their friends are supporting them!

Trust it, it works; it really is real!

Number 11, this is something a lot of teachers don’t think about until it happens. You need to use your own professional judgment regarding your special ed kids, also the kids that transfer to your class or school late in the year, and hard-working low-ability kids that just struggle with math—all in my class the policy is all hard-working kids get a C- or higher.

I make sure I follow whatever laws are in place of students IEPs required for me to do with their special ed needs. And low ability kids, hey, I promise all parents because some parents are like, “Well, you know, I’ve never had my kid have to actually earn their A before. What if they work hard and get a D because they're low at math?”

I say, “Hey, your kid works hard! I promise them a C- or better.” And that usually, parents are like—the way they respond is usually, “Finally! For the first time in my child’s life, and even in my own life when I was a parent when I was young is the first time this teacher is actually going to grade my kid based on them actually learning, not just because they’re cute and smile and act nice!”

So they love that!

Number 12: Don’t forget, come April-May, you've still got to review for the big test—state tests or whatever you've got to do in your state.

And now this year, a lot of states and—and I know federally because of the whole coronavirus thing state tests in California and I think across the nation have been cancelled or postponed or something like that.

But for next year or when we get back to normal, some, you've still got to review because some of their skill mastery was months ago, months ago.

So review with unit tests on Khan Academy, the course challenges, make the kids retake those. They’re going to say, “But I forgot how to do it.” Well that’s good! You’ll get to learn what you need to review!

And non-con assessments, use all those.

Number 13: Be aware that with any digital platform, cheating is possible. We've already talked about that.

Number 14 last point: Remind them constantly they are changing their lives forever!

This is real! This is going to change their lives as it has for my students the last three years, and I know for a fact based on the practice state tests that my kids were taking that this would have been fourth year had we gotten to take the real estate test that my kids would have just blown their previous growth out of the water with huge growth.

I predict my kids would probably have grown about 100 points this year if we had a state test on average in growth.

So here’s some resources, Jeremy, you’re going to take it over from here.

So it's all you! First of all, a huge shout out back to you, Tim, because this is amazing! Like, I think the very first webinar you did was kind of an appetizer, an hors d'oeuvre, if you will. This is absolutely the main course!

So I think folks are feeling both really satiated, but also hungry for the next thing.

So do about those burning questions for you. Don’t forget, you guys can—you’ll get a recording and go back and rewind and re-watch and pause and email Jeremy and bug him with your questions!

Yeah, so Tim, the generous saint that he is, offered his own email address in the last webinar and live to regret that, so please funnel all questions to me going forward.

I do not regret that! I do not regret that; I was very happy to do that—but I’m now wiser! So go ahead, Jeremy!

Cool! So I want to address the elephant in the room that’s coming in from Keith, as well as a couple of other educators. He says, “This is amazing, and I would love to do this at the start of the school year! But given these very unusual circumstances we find ourselves in with 10 weeks left remote learning, what would you do if someone was starting totally brand new with this right now at this time?”

Okay, so if I was a teacher, we’re all doing remote learning or something like that. Keep up with your normal assignments. Don’t change things right now! You’re going to have major kickback from parents and probably administrators who hear from those angry parents.

Don’t change your class routines right now, but what I would do, I would allow an extra credit opportunity to buffer grades, especially for the struggling kids. Make sure that it’s balanced in a way that doesn’t warp their grades!

They still focus on your current grade level assignments. But I would go ahead and assign for extra credit the early math, the arithmetic, and for secondary, the pre-algebra courses, and tell the kids, “Hey, this is extra credit.”

I’ll give double extra credit to the two or three kids who master the most or grow the most on these or whatever. You use your own teacher magic. You know your kids the best, but I would still assign this as an extra credit assignment, as an easy review.

Tell them, “Hey, this is easy, but don’t forget to start with the course challenges because they’ll quickly level up, and they’ll quickly show that they can do this!”

“Oh wait, I never learned this kindergarten skill! I don’t know what this is because this happened every year with my kids. There’s so much they learn that they did not learn in kindergarten, first, second, and third grade!”

But by going back, you should see the little looks on their faces like, “Wow! I never realized that we were supposed to learn this, and now I can do this little skill for the little kids!” So I would do that!

Assign it as an extra credit optional assignment. Unless you’re allowed to make it required, use your own judgment—that’s what I would do! And let it enhance and supplement grades!

Otherwise, they’ll be like, “Well, you know, why am I doing this?” Well, it’ll change your life is what it will do!

Tell them this is great summer work! Tell the parents to work on this over the summer, and they can keep you posted as teachers. You can keep your Khan Academy classes and watch their growth and encourage them over the summer if you have district emails with them, and you can still confer with them through district channels.

Alright, that’s my advice for that!

Okay, amazing! So now let’s fast forward a little bit to September! Let’s assume that we get back to normalcy at some point—fingers crossed—we even want to do this under perfect circumstances.

The number one question we’re getting, this is sort of really nicely put by Kelly. Where do you get the time? Kelly says, “We have a four-day week, so semester has about 65 to 70 days. Before you take away testing, FFA sports, maybe 50 to 60 days, 40 to 50 standards per grade, etc., etc. How do you make time for this in this crazy hectic world that educators inhabit?”

Okay, like I said at the beginning—the first disclaimer: you need to make this fit your situation, your parameters, your boundaries, and guidelines.

So if you notice that on-task data, my kids have averaged, since December 16th, the start of grading for the second semester, because I’d have grades done on December 16th for the first semester, my average hard-working student averaged about an hour a day of Khan activity!

Do your kids have time for an hour a day? I bet you can make that happen! Especially if you motivate kids to go above and beyond!

And especially when your students begin to realize that you are going to grade based on mastery, not based on did they try hard, but fail their quiz? You know, you don’t just give an A because they tried hard, but they can’t actually do the work!

When you start showing an expectation of grading based on mastery, your 30 kids are used to getting all A’s and B’s, even for the high class, especially for the high classes that come to you at the secondary level—they’ll start to realize, “Wait, wait, wait! You mean I have to actually like learn this, not just turn in a homework page with all the wrong answers?”

You know, they’re used to that! But they need to start getting used to is they have to actually prove that they learned it, and kids love the fact that you can actually track their growth!

So they start working harder and they start working above and beyond, 30 minutes of homework a night. And at the secondary level, most teachers are comfortable, safe, and legally protected to assign an hour of homework a night!

I bet they can get that done. Now, the balance that—as I’ve been answering a lot of teachers’ questions—the balance of practice skill practice that I’ve had is about half of their time—fifty percent of their time on Khan spent on sixth grade work and the other half of their time spent on K through 5 review material or the early math class and the arithmetic class.

That’s what I do! This class I have this year is even 20 points lower than last year as they came to me.

And so I learned after the first semester—hey, I’m going to adjust. I’m going to take away the fourth grade and fifth grade and just make them do early math, third grade and arithmetic! So also be flexible!

But there is time if you start making them prove their learning as opposed to making math about busywork and memorizing algorithms. So that’s my thoughts on that!

They can do it!

Even if you start making them do it in the time that you do have, they will still learn far better than under the old time-driven model.

Focus on mastery, not get done what you can in two weeks and that’s it!

Great!

And Tim, do you have time for one last question?

Oh, I have all the time you want, Jeremy! Make this as long as you want!

Well, I gotta get you back to your family because they’re gonna wonder if you’ve been abducted being the one teacher left at your school!

Let me ask you this one last question because I think you’ve actually had a lot of the other questions that were asked about what do you do with not for homework, what do you do in terms of signing course master goals?

I think the really powerful thing about the session is now as an educator myself, I can actually visualize what it looks like. I think the one missing piece that Humongue is asking about is what are you doing while your students are working on Khan?

Can you sort of help us visualize how that works?

So if you watch the video earlier in the slide deck about what it looks like in my classroom, you know you teach, they take notes, you practice it as a class, and then while they’re working on Khan, I’m circulating among the students.

I’m tracking the growth data on that skill or that particular skill or that unit and seeing who’s moving up and who needs help and touching base with each of those kids that are struggling and making sure they’re getting the help they need and moving along.

I’m not just sitting at my desk reading the sports page, you know—I’m not at ESPN.com—I’m circulating around and helping the kids as needed! Encouraging peer buddies to reach out to their friends.

“Hey, there’s somebody at your table who needs help. Can you help them out?” That kind of stuff.

So I’m actively engaged. I’m not babysitting!

Cool! I love it!

Well, I think you’ve inspired us, especially in this relatively dark time, to aim for something even brighter and higher in our own educational lives.

I know there are a lot of questions left out there, and I’ve promised to protect Tim’s sanity and his inbox!

So please shoot me questions with anything that’s on your mind. I’m jeremy.schiefling@khanacademy.org, and on behalf of Khan Academy, and behalf of Tim, I want to thank you for investing in this!

I know our time is very scarce right now, and we have a lot on our shoulders, but the fact that you showed up, the fact that you sort of learned from what Tim has done and sort of taught himself the hard way, I think says a lot.

And Tim, thank you so much for making us all wiser with sharing your expertise and paying it forward!

So thank you all again!

Jeremy, if I can just say one last thing: Teachers, trust your professional judgment! Do what works for you and your kids. There’s no one right way, and you learn by doing! So just dive in and go for it!

Well, and on that note, I hope everyone has a wonderful evening and a great start to the weekend! Wishing you all tremendous success!

Good night, everybody! Cheers!