Khan Academy Best Practices for High School

Hey everyone, this is Jeremy with Khan Academy. Um, thanks so much for joining us on this Friday afternoon or Friday morning, depending on where you're calling from. Wherever you're calling in from, you're in for a special treat today because we have Matt, one of our Khan Academy ambassadors from Georgia, calling in to share his expertise on using Khan Academy with high schoolers.

And while I think Matt would have been willing to offer this at any time, I have to give him special thanks for doing it right now in the midst of this crisis because Matt, like myself, has two kids running around at home. So, Matt's actually taking this call from outside his home just so we can have some peace and quiet to devote to you all today.

So, as a quick reminder, the way these sessions work is we're going to get to know Matt a little bit better, get some of his best tips for using Khan Academy at the high school level, and then once we have that, we're going to open it up to questions from you right from the audience. So, if you want to submit those questions to Matt, just go to the questions tab of the GoToWebinar control panel, and we'll take those in the order they're received.

So, any questions, start submitting those now, and we'll take those very soon. But before we do, again, another shout out to you, Matt, for making time in your busy day, your busy teaching schedule, your busy home front life. And just to kick things off, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background as an educator and how you got started with Khan?

Absolutely. And I appreciate Khan Academy for having me and giving me this opportunity to share some things with you. So, my name is Matt Colbruth. I've spent seven years as a formal educator. I have a bachelor's degree from Dalton State College with an education certification, and I am about eight weeks out from having a master's degree in math education from Thomas University.

I spent my first three years after I graduated in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at a school, East Hamilton Middle High School. I taught 7th grade math, I also taught 8th grade algebra, and served as the middle school boys basketball coach and an assistant high school basketball coach. In 2016, I moved to my current employment with Catoosa County Schools in Northwest Georgia. I spent my first year as a traveling teacher between two schools, Lakeview Fort Oglethorpe High School and Ringgold High School.

After the first year, Lakeview Fort Oglethorpe had a full-time position available. I was a half-time general ed math teacher and a half-time special ed math teacher, and that's what I've served for the last three years. I've taught Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Math of Finance, Foundations of Algebra at the general ed and special ed levels. I serve as the assistant girls' basketball coach and an assistant baseball coach. I also am the Algebra 1 team facilitator for our PLC group, our Professional Learning Community, and I serve on our response intervention initiation team. We're just now getting our response intervention program kind of kicked off, and so I serve on that team as an active member.

Wow, Matt, you are a man of many hats! You've done this for a little while, and it's just a joy to... I mean, I love being an educator. I think it goes back to my childhood. I was one of the older of my cousins, and I had a large family, close-knit family, but I wanted to see my younger siblings, my younger cousins, just wanted to see them become the best that they could be. And I still kind of hold that true to now with my students. I just... It's kind of carried on as I guess my calling.

Very cool! I know they need you more than ever right now, so thanks for all that you're doing. And just to sort of dive into this question of using Khan Academy in the midst of all this, how do you normally use Khan Academy? How do you typically integrate it into your day-to-day?

So, my students usually see some sort of Khan Academy almost every day, pretty much every day. At the beginning of the year, I assign them a mastery challenge, and so with my Algebra 1 class, which is typically what I teach, I will assign Algebra 1 mastery, the course mastery, usually in August or early September. So when I do that, that allows them to see their progress and allows them to really work towards a goal, and we set bi-weekly goals to have them achieve that course mastery by the end of the year.

So, I see you're kind of going through some of the things to set up that course mastery. Once you get everything set up, it's really not a hard task, but it gives you so many things to be able to see how well your students are progressing throughout the year.

Yeah, and does this sort of explain for teachers who are coming from more of an assignments mindset to this mastery mindset? What is course mastery? And, like, why is it important?

So, through the course mastery, it used to be done with what they called missions, and we kind of moved into the course mastery. But the idea is that everything, especially mathematically, everything is built upon each other. You have to have good foundations before you can begin building on top of that. I've heard Sal say in some of his TED talks that if you're building a house, you don't have an inspector come in and say, "Oh, well, that, you know, your foundation's got 80%, it's eight percent half as code. You know, we can start building the first level and the second level." Eventually, that crashes down.

So, the idea of course mastery is that you work through different units and different lessons and different levels of whatever subject it is. For instance, for Algebra 1, it begins with an algebra foundations piece unit, and you work through that algebra foundations unit. You gain points for assignments that you complete and questions that you answer correctly, and you continue moving through that unit until you've completed it. It has some quizzes available in it; it has a unit test available for each unit. And as I said, students earn points every time they complete these with accuracy, and they will level up and eventually get to that mastery point.

Absolutely. So basically what you're setting out at the beginning of the regular school year is, "Hey, we have a high bar, not just to get through the textbook, but to master each foundational skill along the way." And course mastery kind of drives them to that high bar.

Now let me sort of switch gears a little bit. That's all well and good if September, and if it's normal times. Now that it's April and it's the strange new world that we're living in, if you were just starting with Khan Academy as a high school teacher today, what are the one or two things you would do just to get a quick win next week, just to get some wind behind your back?

Well, I think the first thing that you need to do is be able to set up your classes. And so when you sign in as a teacher, you will see this screen—kind of your teacher dashboard. And so to set up your class, we're lucky in Catoosa County that we all have Google Classrooms. And so Khan Academy does sync directly; we'll pull in rosters from Google Classroom. So all you have to do is click on the "Add New Class," and if you have Google Classroom, you can actually import your class directly from Google Classroom, and your rosters are automatically put into Khan Academy.

So, you don't really have to do a whole lot. If you don't have the Google Classroom already set up, you can enter your class name, and then you are asked to add courses for your class. For instance, mine is Algebra 1, and I do typically go back and maybe add like a pre-algebra course to it just so I can see those whenever I'm making assignments, see those lessons.

But you can choose whatever courses you like—mathematics or anything. And then to add your students, like I said for Google Classroom users, it's very, very simple. Just connect to your Google Classroom. They can also share a link with their students, and their students can click on that link, and they will be able to—they will automatically be joined.

I have—I’ve been using Khan Academy for years and years, and so when I was doing middle school, I would used to create the student accounts for them because this was before I had any sort of Google Classroom. And so I would create the students' accounts, put their names in, it would give me a username and a password, and I would share that with the students, and they—I thought they would get on Khan Academy. That's great!

So, multiple ways to get started. And then, just sort of take this through to the next step. Like, let's say you've built out your class, you've invited your students. What do you do to just sort of get a little bit of expertise under the students' belt?

So, the assignments tab, I do use quite often. So when you click on the class and you get into the screen that you're in under the assignments and you click to assign, it has the entire course—every unit and everything built underneath that. And so you can assign an entire unit, as Jeremy's done here. He’s clicked on the check mark, and you can assign entire units.

If you don't want the entire unit, if you just want to chunk it—which is what I typically do—you may find a lesson that will assign a few videos or a few practice assignments, or you may just want to assign one practice assignment. And those are indicated with the pencil mark over on the left-hand side. You can click on the assignment to see what kind of questions it's actually going to be asking and make sure that that is what you want.

And one of the great things, in my opinion, that the assignments, the exercises do is generally— I don't believe there's any exercise that has more than seven or eight questions in it. And so it's nothing that is overwhelming to the student. And they're good quality questions, so you get a good idea of what your student does know or doesn't know, but it's not going to take them an hour and a half to complete.

So once you've decided what you want to assign, you click on the assign button. And you have some different options there: you can have that each student does a different set of questions. Most of the questions I've seen banks, upwards around 40 and 50 questions in each step. Or you could have all students do the same questions. There's been a lot of times that I've had students do the same questions for the fact that I can have them either do that at the end of class or for homework, something of that nature. And then later in the class or the next day, we can come in, and we use that—their information, how they've answered those questions, and we talk about why this was a good answer, why this was a bad answer, and it's not just to give me a number grade to put in the grade book.

Very cool! Well, okay, go for it, Matt.

Oh, I'm sorry. So, the other great thing that I like under this screen is that under the students tab, you can select to send it to all students. But there have been many times where I've wanted to maybe differentiate, or some students have mastered a certain skill, and I may only choose, you know, a few students, two, three students to send an assignment to. And especially we use this a lot with our RTI program. We use the MAP test and use Khan Academy—the way Khan Academy links to it—so there's a lot of times where not every student needs that assignment, so I will only assign to a few students.

Beautiful! And then you can set your due date and your time, so it goes out to the students. What do the students see? Can you talk a little bit about that experience?

Absolutely. So, if you go back to the top or to the teacher dashboard, back to your home, you can click on your username or your name in the top right-hand corner, and it will show you the learner home. And so under learner home, that kind of gives you a view of what the students are going to see. And when the students log into Khan Academy, once you have given an assignment or you have given a course mastery, on the left-hand side, all of their assignments, all of their classes, so they can be enrolled in multiple classes. I know our world history teacher has just recently started using Khan Academy quite a bit for his class.

So, beyond the math classroom, and their assignments and their classes all show up on the left-hand side. If they have a course master goal, that course mastery shows up there. Also, the assignments show up there. And if the assignment is past due, it shows up under the past tab. If it's still an active assignment, then it would obviously show up under the active assignments tab.

And so a student clicks into an assignment that says Mr. Colbruth has just assigned to me—they see it on their screen. And how do you typically recommend that students use this? Like, do they just go through in one shot? Do they do it multiple times? They get support?

It's very, very—I think this is one of the toughest things to get across to the students: using some of the supports that Khan Academy offers. I started using Khan Academy way back when it was just YouTube videos, and the videos are some of the best help that I think the students can get. If I can get them to use it, so under—whenever they give it their best try and they don't get a question right, they can get help.

And they have either hints available to them or video content that is available to them, and I’ll even tell students if you've missed one or two questions, even if you try your first time or you don't try, you just have no idea what it is, use those videos, use those hints to help you understand the material. They're reluctant to do that because they don't like to get questions wrong, but I tell them if you can learn it, then learning it is much more important than one correct answer.

Absolutely! So definitely lean on Khan Academy to give that live real-time feedback even if you can't be there to give it yourself. And then just sort of bring it full circle back to the teacher view. We'll take questions from the audience in one second. Once your students have started to complete these exercises, where are you looking to sort of understand what's happening?

Yeah, so in the classroom on the classroom page, you have to under the assignments. There’s a tab for scores, so you'll click on the scores tab and it will give you the scores for each student, whichever assignments you have. So, you can look at that, and then if you want to look at individual reports, you can click on the actual score for that student.

So when you click on the score, it will show you what questions they've attempted, how they answered them, which ones they got correct, and which ones they got wrong. And I know up at the—for the attempt, a lot of times I will look at their first attempt to see kind of how they answered it to begin with, and what their initial thinking was. And then their last attempt is really how they completed the question.

The other place that I have—I've started recently using, and this is fairly new to me—is under the classroom page is the activity overview. And here you can look at how much time students are spending on Khan Academy, what skills they are practicing, you know, how many skills they are leveling up, and you can also look at individual students, look at really the activities they're doing on Khan Academy. So when you click on that student's name, it will show you a lot more in-depth information about what the student is doing on Khan Academy. You can also see individual student assignments from that page, and the time they're spending as well.

That's great! So I think that's probably more than enough for a week or two of just getting adjusted to Khan Academy. Let's pause there in the interest of sort of the reality of the situation because I know you could go on to probably three hours of in-depth advanced tips. Let's just take the questions from the audience and see where people's minds are at.

So first question is coming in from Belinda, and Belinda asks a really important question that sort of goes beyond the technology. What are your suggestions, Matt, for how to handle progress for students who are not doing assignments, even over extended periods? I know we're in very, very unusual times now, but how would you recommend handling, you know, a student who's just not making any progress on Khan Academy?

Well, I think one of the things is the communication between the teacher and the student. And so during a normal time, if I see that students are not making progress, I have a conference with that student. I talk with that student, and I think there is a—you know, Khan Academy is not a babysitter; it's not a replacement for me. I still have that relationship with the student, and I speak with them to try to motivate, find that motivation for, you know, why is this important? Why do you need this? What kind of correlation does it have to your life? And now during these times, I still am trying to find ways to communicate with students, whether it be through email messages or through—I use an app for Mind App that allows me to send messages via text to students. And so I still try to find those ways to communicate and, you know, really drill down the importance of the assignments and hopefully use my relationship with them to drive that forward.

Great, great! Yeah, I think even in these extenuating circumstances, communication with students is still the key to pretty much all great teaching. And even if it's communication over an app or a video conference or whatever, reaching out beyond just, "Hey, here's an assignment," it's so important.

Speaking of that, Sandy has a question for you that kind of extends that question. What if you have students who are not only struggling with grade-level material, but actually have big gaps in their foundations? They're already coming to you in high school many years behind. Is there any opportunity to use Khan to help catch them up?

Absolutely, and I'm glad you said that because one of the great things that we've been doing at LFO that I'm very proud of is our RTI program, our Response to Intervention program. And if you try to research and find many resources on high school RTI programs, there's not a lot out there. We couldn't find any. So, Khan Academy, in a partnership with NWEA and MAP testing, is one thing that we have used this year.

And so we gave our students a MAP assessment at the beginning of the year, which kind of diagnoses and tells us exactly where they're at. And we have students all the way, you know, coming into ninth grade, all the way down on a fourth and fifth grade level on certain math skills. And so we set up little classes for them during our guided studies time—really during our flex time—and we used Khan Academy to reach back into those fourth and fifth grade concepts and re-teach and try to solidify that because, as we said, if you do not have the—you don't have those foundations, it's hard to build off of it.

So we would find—we used the data that we gathered from the MAP test to identify what content we needed to focus on for those students and then use Khan Academy to help teach and assess students on those concepts.

I love that! It's such a powerful sort of way to make sure that each student is getting what they need, not just whatever your pacing guide is telling you today. Did you use the mappers tool out of curiosity, Matt?

I certainly did! So, if you just—I searched mappers, and really, it'll pop right there. It is. And so when you go in your classes, if your classes are already set up, you can enter the MAP scores if you have used the MAP test, and you enter the MAP scores for the data that you have for the students that you have, and then it will give you a recommendation for what concepts those students need to be working on.

Very cool! So I've just pasted that link into the chat box, so if anyone is using the MAP assessment in their school, they can definitely take advantage of that.

Here's another important question about differentiation. Christina says, "For special education students at the high school level, how do we make accommodations? Would you recommend making special worksheets for them, pulling these questions out of Khan Academy? How do you serve that audience in particular?"

So a lot of times it's—I limit the number of questions or the number of assignments that I do with them. We do a lot really just as a class, so we may present questions up on the board as a class and then kind of walk through that altogether, not not as much as an independent activity. I also have a limited use of iPads, and one thing that a lot of—I found that a lot of my students like to do is use the iPads because they can touch it, and they can draw on it, and they can—the Khan Academy app allows you to use a pencil tool and actually, you know, show some work on it, and it—for whatever reason, it does tend to engage the students a little bit more.

I think that there are certain accommodations that you can provide there, but again, I will interject and say the teacher is probably the most important tool that you have. So using the things that you know and the strategy that you have to blend the two, you know, between Khan Academy and the things that you are doing in the classroom are, you know, crucial to that sort of intervention.

My apologies. There are just sort of showing off one way to sort of draw—even if you don't have fancy technology—in that assignment score report that Matt had talked about a couple minutes ago, you could actually share the screen on a Zoom call or Google Hangout call with your students and walk through live how you might solve a problem step by step.

So just another way to build that communication line to your students. Let me ask another really important question from Bryce. Bryce says, "How do you typically grade, Matt? Do you take scores from Khan into account? Do you build your own assessments? How does Khan fit into that?"

Great question because we've been having this discussion at our school about grading and what grades should look like extensively here recently. So, our subject area, our Algebra 1 teachers, have recently decided that we are grading for the most part on course mastery. So based on the assessments that we give, and whether that be through chronic formative assessment, through Khan Academy, or a paper-and-pencil assessment—unit tests, we take those grades and we basic—whatever our learning target is, we base it on a scale of one to four, whether it's one being a beginning-level learner or four being a master-level learner, or somewhere in between.

So, and that makes up 70% of our grading process. So there could be some times where the Khan Academy, like I said, fits as a formative assessment, but a lot of time, most of it I use for the other 30%, my daily grades that I take, and I use the grades that they have made on the assignments, but I allow unlimited number of attempts because I'm not worried that a student doesn't know it on Monday if they know it on Friday of that same week or if even if it takes them two weeks to learn it.

My goal is by the time they leave my class that they understand the material and the content that I'm wanting to teach, regardless of how long it takes them to learn that.

I love that! Yeah, and I've heard that from so many other educators recently—the Khan Academy is not about whether you're, you know, quote-unquote, getting an A or a B, but whether you have that growth mindset—are you constantly pushing yourself towards that mastery goal even if it's a really long stretch for you. And so using that to sort of look at the progress they're making can be even more important.

Really important question from Sandy. Sandy says, "Hey, you know, if we're trying to figure out where our students are, they've obviously been away from their regular routines for a little while and want to do maybe some kind of baseline diagnostic, is there any way to do something similar to that in Khan Academy just to get a sense of where students are at right now?"

I would say that's a good question, and I may not know a perfect answer to it. One thing I have used to maybe, as like I have used as a pre-test, is the course challenges or the unit tests within each of the subject areas. So say we were in a unit of quadratics before we left for our extended break, and so I used—under the quadratic unit, at the very bottom, there's a unit test. You can assign that unit test, and it will cover everything that's within that unit, and you can see what questions students get right and get wrong.

That's great! Yeah, I think that's just the easiest way to quickly figure out what are the skills that they're lacking where they are and then pinpoint as you make those differentiated assignments as Matt talked about. That's great!

Let's see here. This is a sort of a basic question about just making sure that assignments are on target. Ayami wants to know, "Matt, is there any way to change the due date of an assignment after I assign it?"

Great question because I've done this multiple times, many, many times. Yes! So under the assignment tab, when you go to manage instead of the assign or scores, you can go to manage. And on the far right-hand side, you can click the actions and the edit button, and that will allow you to change if you want to add students to that. You can do that. And again, there's the change the due date and the time, and you click save changes, and those changes will be made.

Another probably similar question is that what happens when students—when you have a new student come in? We're a very transient school, and so I had multiple times where I had a new student come in. And so I would add them to my Google Classroom and then resync on Khan Academy. Under the settings tab, you can reset update sync with Google Classroom. Once that is done, when you go back to the assignments tab, it will give you a prompt, asking if you want to reassign the assignments that are active currently to the new students.

And so you all you have to do is click save or yes, and it will allow you to reassign or give those assignments to the new student walking in.

Cool! And then another really sort of important foundational question from Phil: "Okay, so I'm curious to do these assignments, but I want to actually understand what I'm assigning before I give it out. Is there some way for me the teacher to view the course or view the exercise before it goes out to my students?"

Absolutely! So under the assignments tab, you can scroll through the entire course as we had said before. The videos, if you click on the link for the videos, it will take you directly to that, and you can watch the video in its entirety. For the practice, the exercises and the articles, you can view the article by clicking on the tab.

And for the exercises, it shows you the complete set of list of questions to see what that would look like. And then you can also click on the student view to see what it will look like for the student. Another thing on the assignments is that I've had a lot of teachers who don't necessarily—for whatever reason, they don't like looking through that entire list for a specific thing that they know that they want to assign.

So they will use the search bar up at the very top, and they may search quadratic, yeah, quadratic equations. And once they find—so they know exactly what they want to assign to their students, they just need to find it. And they'll use that search bar; they'll find the exercise that they want to use, and they will click on it.

And I've used this quite often too; the tab at the top now allows you to assign that specific assignment to the students through that method once you see it on your screen. Once you see the student view on your screen, so you can still have the same options and assign it that direct in that way.

I love that because I feel like it can be totally overwhelming to look at that massive list of skills and videos on the course. But if you just want one skill or one video, search for that thing you want and then click the blue bar to go right to the assignment piece.

Okay, I know we're running out of time, so I want to finish up with three questions, starting with a really great one that I received from Rose, an eighth grader. So again, these webinars are promoted very broadly. Rose says, "I'm an eighth grader who's getting ready for high school next year, and I'm worried with this whole thing happening, you know, in school being closed. How can I be ready? How can I prepare?"

As a high school teacher speaking to a future high schooler, what advice would you give Rose for really making sure she's ready for prime time, hopefully knock on wood, come September?

Well, first I would say, Rose, could you—if you want to move to Northwest Georgia and come to my classroom? It sounds like you're a great student, so that is awesome! But you're concerned with it. But using Khan Academy, my suggestion would be to go into the courses in the top left-hand corner and choose that—in our school, we move into Algebra 1. So, if you're moving into Algebra 1, select the course that you were wanting to do or that you're going to be moving into and begin at that first unit and work your way through it.

Use the videos as a help. Like I said, I started with Khan Academy on YouTube, and using videos to help me kind of solidify the things that I was hearing in class. But even as first instruction, those videos are great instructional videos, and I highly recommend them to walk—watch through them and then practice your exercises.

And one thing that we have not touched on is the mastery challenges that are somewhat new to Khan Academy. So whenever you click on that course page at the top, you will receive a mastery challenge. A lot of times I have my students do that maybe as a warm-up when they come in in the morning or throughout the day when they finish an assignment to go work on their course mastery challenge.

And this is just a spiral review for all the things that you have covered to revisit and make sure you've not forgotten the things that you have done through on Khan Academy.

All right, great advice for Rose! And Rosie, wish you good luck. I know it's a hard time right now, but thank you for joining us. And I have a feeling that there are awesome Mr. Culberth's in your future in high school, so more support to come!

Second question for you, Matt, is I know we haven't been able to cover every question that came in. Right now, if educators are still hungry for answers after the session, where would you recommend they go next?

So a couple of different places that I would say. One is—first, I would say under your teacher dashboard, I've directed a lot of teachers to this point—is the resources tab. And there's a lot of good videos underneath that resources tab, especially for getting started. So if you're really new to it and you want to look at some different things, you know, check all of those out. If you run into like a specific question or something that you need to ask, underneath your name in the top right-hand corner, there is—when you click on it, there is a help section.

So you can click on that help section, and your questions are sent directly to Khan Academy experts who get back to you quite quickly. You just have to report the problem at the top, and I've had good experience with that. The last area that I would recommend everyone joining is a Facebook page, and it is Khan Academy for Teachers. And I'm a member there, and I tend to—I look at it almost daily and just see some of the conversations that are going on there.

But there are a bajillion great Khan Academy teachers that use Khan Academy on there that can answer a lot of great questions— a lot of questions that you have.

All right, awesome! I'm just sharing all those resources in the chat, so if you want to get the resources, if you want to get the request help from Khan Academy or join the Facebook group, all that is in your chat.

And then lastly, I know that you've already shared a ton, but if you have any final words of wisdom for educators out there across the country as we're thinking about, "Oh my goodness, I've got at least a couple more weeks to go, probably many more than that. How do I make the most of this time? How do I support my students and their families?" Any sort of sage advice you can share?

I have just one: try to not get overwhelmed by it all. You know, make sure you're taking care of yourself and taking care of your immediate family first because if you are not in good health, then there's no way you can help anyone else. So take care of yourself. But, two, just try to keep some sort of a communication line open with your students. I think that is the most important thing—that students can know that you are there, that you are available to them.

And the content will start to—once they have that relationship, and they know that you're looking out for their best interests, the content side of it starts to kind of fall in place.

I love that! Yeah, it's almost like the advice you give to new parents: you've got to take care of yourself before you can take care of your kids, and the same is doubly true for educators!

So, absolutely! Matt has given us tons of new wisdom to pursue these big challenges we have ahead of us. It's also given us the strength to do it at a time when we need it the most. So, I want to thank you, Matt, for sharing all your expertise today. And I want to thank everyone out there listening in for investing in the session, and I wish you tremendous success in the weeks to come.

Thank you so much, and have a great weekend!

All: Thank you all!