Khan Academy in the classroom | Limits and continuity | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

We have this big moment, and the moment is that for 35 years of my teaching career, I walked into the classroom having no idea if the kids had done the homework or what their commitment was to this subject. And then suddenly, there's this coaching platform on KH Academy that was a total game changer for me. I wasn't imagining that the Khan Academy calculus content would become a big part of our curriculum. I imagined, frankly and wrongly, that we'd use these exercises, suggest kids use it for review, and then when we discovered the coaching platform and how powerful that was, a group of us said, "Let's give it a go. Let's try using Khan Academy as a major part of our curriculum."

My goodness, it changed the way I teach. For instance, five minutes before I walk into class, I can go to the platform and I can look through my list of students to discover that all but two of them had done the homework or had watched the videos, had cleared the, you know, had cleared the hurdle, if you will, of the exercises that I had given them. So when I walked in the room, I didn't have to go over homework anymore, and that was liberating. If there were two students who didn't do the homework, it gave me the opportunity to pull them aside and say, "Hey, I see you didn't get to it," or, "I see you struggled with it. Is there a way that you and I can meet later today?" It's because I don't want you to get behind in this.

And the first 15 minutes of class, now all of a sudden, we're breaking new ground; we're doing harder problems. The kids responded so well to it because I think they had years and years and years of Math teachers going over the homework for the first 15 minutes of class, and the poor kids must have been bored to death or thought, "Why bother doing the homework? Because he'll do it on the board anyway." So that was just totally liberating and gave me the opportunity to really think hard about teaching.

Since we started using Khan Academy, the one thing that we can't help but notice is that we're having more kids make it to the end of BC calculus. It's clear to me that we're having more girls and more underrepresented kids finish our BC Calculus class than we ever did before, and I got to believe it's our new way of thinking about teaching. Using Khan Academy in the classroom and for homework assignments has got to be a big part of that.