Homeschooling your kids? Learn how to use our weekly math learning plans

Hello! Welcome! We are so glad to have several of you, a few hundred already here today, and really appreciate your time. My name is Dave Herron. I work on our team that supports teachers in school districts at Khan Academy, and I am joined today, about two miles away from her home in San Francisco, by my colleague Vicky Lang, who is a learning scientist on our team. So hello, Vicky! I’m also joined by my colleague Dan, who helps lead our marketing team from San Mateo, California. Hi, Dan! He will help actually be surfacing some of your questions all throughout the webinar, and we'll leave the last few minutes of the webinar to answer as many as we can.

So you'll see a question tab on the GoToWebinar panel, and if this is your first webinar with us, then go ahead and take a look at that. At any moment, when a question pops into your head, please put that in there so that we can do our best to answer as many as possible.

We're here to spend the next 30 minutes or so on the topic you should be seeing on your screen. Some of you may have found yourself, over the last four, five, six weeks, maybe suddenly, as homeschool teachers in addition to all the other responsibilities you're balancing. We know it is a whole lot to juggle. Here at Khan Academy, we have created daily schedules and now weekly math learning plans to try to support you as you support your kids, so that they can stay on track as much as possible in their math courses, as well as other courses that they may be missing in school.

We're here to break down these plans for you, and I want to thank, before we move on, some of the key supporters who have been providing support to Khan Academy so that we can increase the amount of support we're providing throughout this time. You'll see those names there on the screen. Our main goal is to break down the plans for you, explain all the ins and outs of these weekly math learning plans, and again, answer as many of your questions as possible.

Before we move on, I'm going to start a poll to see how familiar this audience is with the learning plans that we're talking about. So take the next few seconds, once it pops up on your screen, to tell us what best represents your familiarity. Are you: I've never seen them before, I'm here to learn; or I've seen them, but I have not used them with my kids; or finally, I have started using them already with my kids?

So we'll take about 10 more seconds. If you haven't yet, fill in your vote. Three, two, one. About two-thirds of you have submitted your vote, and here's where we're at: over half of you have never seen these learning plans before, so thank you for joining despite not having that past familiarity. We'll walk you through how to find them.

Then the others, about a quarter, have seen them but haven't started using them. We do have some maybe intermediate or advanced users who have already started using them with your kids. We'll be really appreciative of any feedback or questions that you have since you've already started using them. We have a survey at the end of the webinar if you want to give us more advice on how we can improve them moving forward.

So given that over half of you have never seen them before, let's start with a pretty basic question. I'll take this one, Vicky. How do I even find the learning plans to begin with?

So if you go to our website at khanacademy.org, on the very home page, which you should see an example of on the screen now, there will be a blue banner at the top that links you to some of our remote learning resources. If you click that link, you'll be brought to that page that's shown on the right side of the screen, where one of the main options are the weekly learning plans. That will give you access to all of the learning plans that we've created so far. We have them at many different grade levels for math, and we recently published a high school biology learning plan as well. They're all in a format that's very easy to print if you do have a printer accessible for you.

You know, the learning plans for kids are often helpful to have in print form. So when you open it, you may notice the formatting looks different than a regular Word document, but that makes it easy if you press control P or whatever the shortcut is on your computer to print those out. So you might be multitasking right now and following those steps to access the learning plans.

Just as two other quick reminders, I should have mentioned this right at the beginning, but there's a copy of these slides available to download as a PDF within the browser that you have available. Then second, we're recording the webinar, and we'll send you a copy of the recording soon after, within a few hours after the conclusion.

Let's move on, though. Who are the plans for? What's the big goal or idea behind these plans, Vicky?

Well, as you said, they're for students from third grade through high school for mathematics, and then we also have one for high school biology. They're really for providing a clear goal for what to work on week to week. We know that it's great to set a large goal of being ready for next year when school starts again, and it can also be really helpful in reaching our goal to break it down into smaller steps. So we're breaking that goal down into week by week steps to get your child ready for next year.

On the next slide, we can see that the real audience for this is folks whose districts maybe have not provided enough support, or you're looking for something a little bit beyond what your district has provided for you. This is an overwhelming time for school districts; what they've been able to provide has really varied, and we want to make sure that everybody has access to a plan that they can use to make sure that your kiddos are ready for school next year.

Perfect, and as you mentioned, these are far more specific than the daily schedules that we've put out, right? I know we're receiving this question already in the chat room. I think of the daily schedule saying maybe at this time per day you could work on this course. If you're in sixth grade, the weekly learning plan is gonna get way more specific on what unit and what the actual goal could be to complete by the end of it.

So let's talk about that. What would you need to know about the learning plans to just even get started on that first day with your kids?

Well, if we look at a sample, we can look at that sixth-grade sample learning plan, and I'll just show you how it's structured there. At the beginning, there's gonna be some instructions about how to use it, as well as, you can see, it says, "click here for explainer video." That's a short video where Sal talks more about what to do with it, and then there's some instructions here about how you're going to get your kids started.

So let's, for example, talk about a kiddo who was supposed to be finishing sixth grade right now and will be entering seventh grade next year. They've already learned probably a lot of the sixth-grade content. This is gonna explain how to have them start with the course challenge to earn credit for the things that they already know. Dave will talk more about that in a few minutes about how that mastery system works and the course challenge works, but they're going to get credit for what they already know by taking sort of a pre-test, and then they're going to have a to-do list of work that they haven't mastered yet. That's going to map onto this table here.

So what you're seeing in this table is the 20-week version of finishing sixth grade, and the 20 weeks will take you right up to August, when seventh grade would begin. In this table, you'll see that each row is a week with an end date on Friday, and then the color changes represent a different unit of instruction that's starting. So, for example, in this one, in the first week, that student would take that course challenge to pre-test out of some of the content. Then they would begin the ratios, rates, and percentages unit, and they would be aiming to get about 600 points that week in that unit.

The next week, they would continue work on that unit; it's a pretty big unit. They would aim to get to 1200 points; that's another 600 points for a total of 1200. The following week, they would aim to get to 1900, and then they would move on to the next course or to the next unit, I mean. You are going to want to decide between the 20-week and the 12-week options. If you keep scrolling down here, you would see that there's a 12-week option that has you finished by the end of June.

That just depends on how much time you want to invest. You're going to be able to fit in a little bit more content if you go with the 20-week option, but we wanted to make sure that if you want to spend only a shorter amount of time and get to maybe the time when the school year would typically have ended, that you're able to hit all the really high points. So that's what the 12-week one does.

If you keep scrolling, you'll notice there's another pair of tables, and these are for a foundational learning plan. Those first two tables tell a sixth grader how to finish sixth grade. This second pair of tables gives you a plan for our arithmetic class, which is a foundational skills class that supports sixth grade. So if you have even more time that you want to invest in sixth grade, or if your student is struggling a little bit with sixth grade, you might have them also work on this arithmetic course to build some of those foundational skills to support it.

That's kind of what you need to know there. Then if we look here, we can see that the most important time in getting these learning plans off the ground, or really in getting anything off the ground with a kid, is the first two weeks, the beginning of it, where you want to really establish your routine and get into a pattern with it. Things that can help you with that are making the plan physical. If you do have a printer, print it. If you don't have a printer, sketch it on a piece of paper. Make it a place where they can write and interact with and really see on the refrigerator or somewhere—making it a clear habit where there's a routine to it. First, I'm going to check my goal; then I'm going to open and do some work; then I'm going to record my progress every day at the same time every day, maybe.

With that, let's see if Dave can tell us a little bit more about the mastery system, because those tables really are grounded in getting to about 70% mastery on each of those units. So we need to understand what those points are and how you would get mastery and how that would work.

Absolutely! As Vicky just showed, there are references to different point goals for learners all throughout these learning plans, and we know that it is motivating to have a clear goal. But it’s also, I'm sure, helpful for you as the parent or adult to just be able to know how those points are maybe calculated and how to encourage your kids to achieve those goals.

So let me show you a few screens. This on the screen right now is our third-grade plan. This would be third-grade common core, and on the left-hand column are all the different units in our third-grade math course, and on the right-hand side are all of the points available for each unit. Every unit has a certain number of skills, and every skill is 100 points. So in the unit at the top, maybe it's worth 800 points; it's got eight different skills in it. Those points are really important for understanding the learning plans because all of the goals reference unit mastery points.

The other thing I want to mention is Vicky alluded to the course challenge. So if we were talking maybe in September or near the start of a school year, then a course challenge may not be the first step for a student if they're just getting started on third grade. But considering that it's springtime, and that your kids have already learned a lot of math this year, the course challenge could be a great way for them to quickly place out of some of the skills that they're already confident in.

So I would guide your kid to click on the course challenge; that's the first step, and it will scroll them down to the very end, actually, and they'll get started on that mixed review of all different skills from throughout the year. Just remember to remind them that it's totally okay if they don't know these answers because it will include some from the later units that they may not have learned yet.

I also want to show a brief video that goes over some of the other learning experiences for students so that I can explain a bit about what you might be seeing in the next few days.

So here I am as a learner, clicking on that blue button in just a minute to start on a lesson. Here we’re in addition and subtraction within 100, and there's going to be a bunch of learning resources: our videos and articles, and then there's gonna be practice resources. So I'm clicking on that first practice problem set. The practice problems—some of them are gonna be only four problems, some seven; the longest might be fourteen if it's like a lot of procedural fluency.

If I'm stuck on the problem, what I just did is I clicked on a video; it was listed right there because it's really closely aligned to the practice that I'm doing. So if I'm done watching the video, and now I know how to do this problem of 92 plus 3, then I can answer it 95. If I'm still not sure, I could get a hint, and the hint is going to mark the problem wrong because it gives away the answer. But encourage your kids to take hints! When we look at our research, the kids that take more hints, even though they're getting the initial problem wrong, they end up making faster progress overall.

So I'm getting the questions right and getting instant feedback on this. You might see the little dots at the bottom of the screen turning green. So I've got a few more to go, and if I do get to 70 or higher, then I'm gonna get points—in this case, I'll get half the points for that scale, 50. So that's contributing to that goal in the learning plan. I’m just about to finish with the last problem, and because I'm about to ace, I think this problem set and get 100, I'm going to get almost all the points for the scale. So there should be some confetti that rains down from the ceiling. I just received 80 points, not quite 100, because it was just one practice set, and I haven't shown that I still understand it when it's mixed in with a whole bunch of different concepts, but I'm on my way towards my goal for that week.

If I go back to the unit overall, then I'll see here in the top left corner, I have now a total of 240 points. So I know that was brief, but that's kind of the three-minute version of our mastery system. I think it’s closely related to a question we've already been hearing a lot: How do I know if my kids are on track?

So we do have parent accounts that you can create on Khan Academy. When we designed those parent accounts, it was in a pre-COVID world where we did not expect parents to be homeschooling en masse. The amount of detail you'll find on there will be helpful for getting an overview of how much time your kids are spending and what they've worked on recently, but it's not going to give the detailed points that you might need to tell if they're on track for the learning plan.

Instead, what we'd recommend is just having your kid maybe once every few days—maybe once a week, whatever might work for you—showing you their screen and talking about how it's going. Then you can look at the points together and turn it into a conversation of sorts. Here again on the right hand, I'll see the point values for each unit, and that if I’m just to sort of do a crosswalk for the learning plan, then on the screen, you'll see intro to multiplication. I currently have 660 points, so I've written that in there in pink into the second week of the learning plan. I'm so close, but good news, in one-digit multiplication, I have 1050 points, so I've exceeded my goal!

The last one that I want to talk over is how you might help your kids when you are stuck. I taught ninth-grade algebra one for most of my teaching career, and even though I was a math teacher, if I were asked by someone more at the fourth-grade level on how to break down a skill, it would be tough because it's hard to know how to teach something at that level given what they understand currently. So don't feel the pressure that you have to be the teacher. Instead, if they come to you and they're stuck and they're saying one topic's really confusing, one strategy we recommend is just to watch one of our videos with them to see how you might go about explaining it. Chances are, after that video, you will understand it quite a bit better than your own kid, and that might help you then coach them a bit on the next few problems if they seem just stuck on one specific problem.

Again, we recommend they take a look at the hints—they'll have multiple hints available for each problem, so they can get just the first bit of the solution, and maybe then they'll have enough of what they need to finish out the problem, or they can click all the way through to the answer. But there is another scenario where you might anticipate just high levels of frustration. Maybe your kid gets a lot of math anxiety or maybe they just have already proven to have a tough time as they try to transition to this really difficult learning environment of learning from home.

So if you think that they are going to have some of that general frustration, you'll see on the screen a list of our different courses. You might decide that you're going to start a level earlier, build their confidence. As Vicky mentioned, these plans are designed for third grade to algebra two. If your kids are more at a kindergarten, first, second grade enrollment, or math level, you might consider also checking out some of the math resources from Khan Academy Kids.

Back to you, Vicky!

I'm meeting! So how do we keep our kids motivated to follow through with these plans week to week?

Well, motivation for kids is—for anybody really—is about value: like what value are you finding in the activity that you're doing? We're not motivated to do things that we don't think are valuable. It also can be about agency; we're sometimes not motivated to do things that we feel like we don't have a choice about.

So the key here really is to think about what your kids value, what's going to make it interesting and exciting for them, and what's going to make them feel like they have some choice and some ownership over the work that they're doing. On this side, there are a couple of suggestions here: you can take on a challenge in parallel with them, so that the value comes in spending time together with a parent who also is modeling learning; you can use a simple reward system; you can give them some choices about maybe when in the day they work on it.

For a full webinar on motivation for your kiddos during this crisis time, we're going to have a full webinar on that next Wednesday, April 29th. We also are going to have a webinar on motivating and managing multiple kiddos on different schedules on May 4th. We had a webinar a few weeks ago on structuring—it was called structuring the day for kids two through seven because we did it with Khan Kids—but what's really communicated there is structure, choice, and connection, and keeping your kids motivated and kind of bought into learning by how you might schedule some choice into their day.

There are some other resources there for you. But next Wednesday, motivation!

A big question here with these learning plans for me, if I was a parent—I am a parent right now—but if I was using this at home, would be, you know, that the first week has already passed in the learning plans, or maybe this doesn't work for my kiddo in some other way in the way that it's structured. How can I adapt it to meet the needs of my own child?

You might need to do a different number of weeks, for example. You might need to start from an earlier grade in order to build confidence. If you anticipate that your kiddo is going to struggle, you might want to revise the goal each week, especially if your child earns a lot of points on that course challenge up front.

The specific numbers that are week by week and those goals might not make sense, or your child might find that they get to a week where they've already earned most of the points in that unit from the course challenge. So maybe they can work a little bit ahead to the next week. We really want you to take what's here as just inspiration to be able to design a plan that's going to work for your specific child in your specific situation.

Given that the first couple of weeks have already passed that are in the learning plan, you might do something like use the 12-week plan but start it now instead of starting it three weeks ago, and it'll take you maybe into July. But really, we want you to just figure out a way to use this idea to build a plan with small goals for your child that will work for you.

With that, I think we're going to take some questions. I'm already seeing lots of great questions in the doc. I'll turn it over to Dan.

Hi everyone! Dave, I wasn't sure if you were going to have a poll before we jump into the questions.

Oh, the poll actually we're going to put as part of the survey right after the webinar on your advice on how we might name these learning plans if "learning plan" isn't the best name. We'll get your thoughts on that after.

Perfect! Well, thanks, Dave and Vicky! Hi everyone, I'm Dan, and I'll be moderating the live Q&A portion of this session. Two things to do before we move into the question portion:

As Dave mentioned earlier, please download this presentation. They’re in the handout section, and a recording of this, as well as the handout, will be emailed to those who registered. We'll post a recording after this as well, and the recording and the document cover everything from the learning plans—what they're for, some of the recommendations, as well as links to other resources that we have available.

The second thing that we want to ask of you all is if you have any questions, please add them now! I know there are already a lot of really good questions in the question box, and I'll facilitate, and Vicky and Dave will do the hard work of actually answering the questions.

So we already have a couple, and Vicky, this one's probably most appropriate for you. Jignesh asks, based on what Sal states today on Axios, what understanding that kids are potentially going through a five to six months learning loss and forgetting another six months worth of potential learning, kids may end up being behind a complete year. What are the practical steps we can do to bridge the gap?

Actually, that’s why we created these learning plans in the first place. So Vicky?

Yeah, this just my heart hurts so much when I think about this, and I know districts are working really hard to figure out what they're going to do in the fall to make sure that kids aren't falling behind. What you can do as the grown-up in the meantime is to keep your kid practicing in just gentle ways. Don't push math all the time in a way that makes them go, "No, I don’t want to," but just gently reminding them that math is part of their life.

Helping them do a little bit of math every day with my—my daughter's six, and we have a lot of mathematical conversations while I'm doing something in the kitchen or while we're picking up our toys. We count the toys; we'll talk about math as we're walking to the park. Well, maybe estimate: does that bush have, do you think that's more than ten flowers or less than ten flowers? Just trying to bring in casual ways of talking about math throughout the day in natural ways with your child.

If you can help them, if they are willing to engage with some online math learning like what we're providing at Khan Academy, I think that's really beneficial to really keep them moving forward with those on-grade level skills.

Yeah, but continually just bringing math in.

Perfect! And Dave, we have a lot of questions around standards alignment. So from Cheryl, she's asking, "Thank you for doing this! Are the lessons geared towards states with high math achievements, such as Massachusetts, or others such as California?" Genie asked a similar question: "Are these based on particular state standards?"

Yeah, great question! So the third through eighth grade and then the high school curations—those are going to be common core curations, and we—the rigor of the questions should be aligned with many of the state's summative exams, but, you know, be the judge of that as you take a look yourself, and definitely consider combining the resources we have with other things that the district may be providing—other resources, especially some of the open-ended responses that they might be getting good practice resources on from their district.

Perfect! Vicky, we're getting a lot of questions around like how much time a student will need for each of these units. So from Cindy, she asks, "How much time approximately per day or per week are the schedules based on?" Lisa asks, "For high school algebra one, roughly how much time should a student dedicate to this to complete everything in the 20 weeks?"

That's a great question! We designed them with the assumption that your student might spend a similar amount of time to what they would spend in school—so about 45 minutes to an hour a day, five days a week—for that amount of time. The amount of time that it's going to really require them to work through all the work is going to depend a lot on how much they already remember and test out of in the course challenge. Some students may move much, much more quickly; some students may take a little more time. It also may vary week to week depending on how much they remember in that particular unit, but that's the basic recommendation.

And kind of to piggyback off of that, Stephanie asks: "How do we know whether to use the 12-week or the 20-week versions?"

I mean, that's really just up to you and how much time you want to invest and whether you want your child to continue to practice math all the way up until school starts again in the fall or only through when the regular school year might have ended. You also might be deciding between the regular on-grade level learning plan and the foundational learning plan. Our thought is you might do both at the same time; you might also choose the foundational one if your child is struggling a little bit more in math, or for specific targeted topics, you might dip into that to support some learning that they're doing in the regular grade level.

Stephanie's also asking if she can switch from one to the other, and I think the answer to that is absolutely! Test it out and see what's most comfortable and appropriate for you.

Yeah, Dave! Elaine asks, "My seventh grader uses Khan Academy for math all the time. How is this different?"

Well, the content should be similar; the student experience on what getting mastery points looks similar as well. But two things might feel different for them: one would be having a really clear goal, and second, might be the extra involvement from you. I think those can make a really big difference with the way they engage with math, but again, the actual content and the mastery learning plans for a system is the same as in the regular school year.

A little bit related to that, Dave, Angelo's asking, "If my child's already doing Khan Academy with his class, would you still recommend him doing the learning plan?"

I would recommend having a conversation with them and just seeing how they're feeling about clarity and what they should be working on. If the answer comes back a little tepid of like, "Well, we're not really receiving much to work on because it is pretty difficult for many districts to just get enough learning resources out there in a short amount of time," then this could supplement that. But if they seem to already have a full plate of math practice coming from their teacher and district, then that might be a signal that these learning plans aren't necessary at this time.

Perfect! And Vicky, we have a question. We talked about grade level and foundational things, but there's a question: where would you start your child working well above grade level?

Yeah, I would start with the course challenge for the next grade level or the course challenge for this grade level. That's a really good way to very quickly—in just about 30 or 45 minutes—get credit for the things they already know and make sure that they don’t create any gaps in things that they don't know. But that's a great way to kind of accelerate progress.

Dave, and then we're getting quite a few questions on like how do I track my kids' progress? How should I think about it? Angela Degati asks, "Do you—you might get."

Well, how is your child—how do you see if your child's doing in these skills?

Yeah, so we sort of touched on this within the webinar that the data available in the parent dashboards is probably not going to be as detailed as you're looking for since it was not created with the homeschool mentality in mind. That being said, you have two options: first option is you could actually create a teacher account and enroll your kid as your own student, and then you will get detailed data. There are a lot of resources on our site for the teacher data reports, or you could just have them show you their screen and have a conversation about it, and that's kind of our primary recommendation because it doesn't require you to know all the ins and outs of our teacher reports.

Perfect! And I think we have time for one more question, and Vicky, this one will be for you. What's the difference between the super ultra strong foundation plan versus the super fun plan? Then related to that, is the 20 weeks just more content or is it the same but just spread out over a different number of weeks?

Yeah, so the difference between the—first, I can't remember how we structured them, but there's a—or what we call them with the super fun or super great. But the first learning plan that has the grade level third-grade course, the sixth-grade course is just the grade-level content that your student would have gotten at school this year. It's the content from the entire grade—not starting now, but the entire grade, in that grade-level course.

The foundational one—the one that says foundational in the name of it—is a related course, like early math or arithmetic, that has more basic skills that probably have that grade level skill, but also stretch back a couple of grades to bring in some core skills to really build a strong foundation of earlier mathematics and math fundamentals. So that's the difference there. I would say try—I would say try to do both or lean into the grade level one unless your child's struggling, and then lean into the foundational one.

The difference between 20 and 12 weeks is—they’re both the whole course in the 12-week. We pulled out some of the units that are a little bit less critical—they're still all math—is important, but maybe the less critical for that grade level and put them as optional at the end.

The 12 weeks just really breaks up the most important key skills from that grade and then says, "If you have extra time, here are the other units that you're going to want to work on," whereas the 20-week just embeds the whole thing in the order you would normally do it.

Perfect! So I think we're at time. So thank you, Dave, and thank you, Vicky, for sharing your expertise. We wanted to thank all of you, our audience, for taking the time out of your busy afternoons to be with us. We know you're extremely busy and we appreciate you investing your time in this session.

If you missed something or you want to go back and replay something—we know this is a lot to cover in a short period of time—this recording will post tomorrow. It'll be made available for those who registered or automatically be sent to you in an email along with the presentation.

We do have quite a few other resources available at khanacademy.org, so if you go there, there's going to be a blue ribbon at the top speaking specifically to remote learning, so you can always check that out. We're making updates quite frequently—every day in fact—so you can always go to khanacademy.org.

Then, before we sign off, we want to ask you to do us one more favor and please take the poll that pops up at the very end of this webinar and let us know two things: first, how we could make future iterations of this session even better for you all, and then what kind of sessions would you like to see next? We've been asking this at the end of each webinar, and it's helping us kind of plan what's most useful for you all.

So please be sure to do that. Dave mentioned the poll in terms of like how to actually name these in a way that resonates with you all, so please, please fill that out for us.

In closing, we know you're juggling a lot as parents right now. This is kind of uncharted territory; you're being asked to be a parent as well as a teacher. We want to be here to support you. One more thing is just we here at Khan Academy want to remind you to be kind to yourselves. You know, these schedules may appear to be a lot—they're really recommendations.

Use them in a way that you feel like is most appropriate, and don't feel pressure to complete all 20 weeks or why not try to get through as much as you can in a way that feels right for you. So from all of us at Khan Academy, thanks again, and thanks for joining us, and goodbye!