For parents: Setting a daily learning schedule for middle school students

Hello all and welcome to Khan Academy for Parents 6th through 8th Grade Remote Learning Webinar. I'm Megan Patani, I lead U.S. Professional Learning here at Khan Academy, and I'm joined today by two of my wonderful colleagues, Roy Chan, who's a member of our U.S. District Partnership Team and he works with teachers and communities all over the U.S., and Dan Too, who's our Director of Marketing, and he's also working with families and communities to help instill best practices for remote learning.

What we'll cover today is how you can keep your children learning during school closures and some best tips and practices for setting up a daily schedule for students to use Khan Academy. One note of what we won't be covering today is account setup or how to get started. This webinar is not going to walk through how to set up an account for you or for your student. So, if you're looking for more information on how to get started with Khan Academy, please see our Remote Learning Quick Start Guide.

These slides and all the resources that go along with them can be found in the handout on the right-hand side of your GoToWebinar panel. Just as a quick note, Khan Academy is free, trusted, and flexible. We're a non-profit with a mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. We have standards-aligned practice and lessons covering K-12 math, grammar, science, computer programming, history, AP courses, official SAT practice, and a lot more. Your students are able to learn on the web or on our app through iOS or Android at any time, anywhere, in over 40 languages.

So, what type of content is available? In addition to full coverage for math, our content library also includes things like American history, computer animation and programming, grammar, growth mindset, which is built in collaboration with PERTS at Stanford, high school biology, and storytelling, which is created in partnership with Disney and Pixar.

Where would students find content or where would you find content? By clicking the left-hand courses menu on the top left of the Khan Academy site, you'll have access to our entire content menu, or you can select "Edit Courses" from the student's homepage to access content and then click "Continue." The content that's originally suggested to your student will be based on the grade level they selected when they set up their account.

Now, let's talk a little bit about daily schedules for 6th through 8th graders. Khan Academy has been sharing school closure schedules for students across grade levels, but we're going to be focusing on what we think of as a middle school range in the U.S., our 6th through 8th grade students. Here is a quick overview of what we recommend.

The areas covered in green are going to be the areas that we focus on a little bit more during this webinar. These are what we think of as academic areas in the day. Starting in the morning, we recommend the students get up, get dressed – yes, actually get out of their PJs – and then focus on their math skills. One of the reasons we recommend that is that students and teachers have said they feel like their brain is ready to work and that they're energized and able to work on math more effectively in the morning.

Now, definitely feel free to adapt this to you or to your students, but again this is a recommendation for many of our teachers and students that they feel like the morning is the best time for them to focus on math. Based on your child or student's grade level, we recommend one of the following math courses as a good place to start: 6th, 7th, or 8th grade math, Algebra 1, or Geometry. If you feel like your student is not quite sure where they should start and then you want to put them on grade level but you know that they already know some of the material, they can use course challenges and unit tests to accelerate through material quickly.

All of our math content is mastery enabled and it covers standards from kindergarten through early college. It includes instant feedback, step-by-step solutions like you're seeing on the screen right now that students can select a hint and see a step-by-step walkthrough of that exact problem. It also offers instruction in the form of videos and articles, practice in single skills in the form of exercises, or assessments in the form of quizzes, unit tests, and course challenges, all the while tracking progress at the skill, unit, and course level for students.

After math time, we recommend students get out and go for a walk or run. If the weather is bad, try something like Just Dance. Find a reason to get up and get moving. Then maybe take some time to read. Khan Academy has compiled a list of books for 6th through 8th graders. If you click on that link, you'll see specifically what those recommendations are from our teachers and community.

Again, take a short break. It's really easy for students to get caught up in wanting to do all the work that they have, but it's important that students get up from their screens and are able to move around. Then we recommend jumping into some English Language Arts. While we have a full grammar course, and it may say third through fifth grade on the content, we've seen students from kindergarten through high school benefit from working on our grammar course.

If maybe that doesn't appeal to your student, try our storytelling course. Our grammar course, like our math courses, is mastery enabled. It covers over a hundred grammar skills and similar to our math courses, it has instant feedback, step-by-step solution instruction in the form of videos and articles, practice, and assessments similar to our math courses. If you feel that your student is able to accelerate quickly through some of the material, have them engage with unit tests and course challenges, and they'll be able to move through that material quickly and then focus their time on skills they may need more practice with.

We also have some new beta content for ELA, which covers standards in second through eighth grade reading and vocabulary. What this means is this is an early version of some new content that's coming for each grade level, and it's broken out for second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. So you can have your student practice on specific grade level appropriate questions, including instant feedback and work rationales for every question, and the passage topics are grade appropriate in areas of science, social studies, and social emotional learning.

To supplement our ELA content, students are also encouraged to engage with our Imagineering in a Box course, which is created in partnership with Disney. This allows for project-based learning and for students to get a little more creative. It includes things like the behind-the-scenes look at how artists, designers, and engineers work together to create Disney parks. It includes instruction aspects of videos and articles and project-based activities to design their own theme park.

After lunch, we recommend that students engage in some science and social studies. Our science courses allow students to look at things like, "What is a virus and how might the human body respond to that?" or look at our history courses to align maybe some historical aspects that align with things that are currently happening in the news or how countries are responding to the pandemic. Our high school biology course, like our math and grammar course, is mastery enabled, covering introductory level biology topics, including areas that are middle school age appropriate.

It includes instant feedback and work rationale for every question, instruction in the form of videos and articles, practice exercises, and assessments in terms of quizzes, unit tests, and course challenges. Our U.S. History course is also mastery enabled. Excuse me, it includes instant feedback, instruction, and practice just like our other mastery enabled courses.

In the very end of the afternoon, what students would think of as the normal end to their school day, we encourage students to engage in some enrichment content. Things like maybe code.org, Express, Force, or Khan Academy's computer programming or growth mindset content. Our computer animation course is an interactive course that demonstrates how traditional school subjects such as math, science, and the arts are a vital part of everyday work put into Pixar's filmmaking process. For many students, this answers the question of "Why am I doing this?" and our interactive units range from the art of lining to set and staging. So it allows students to apply the concepts that they're learning in their academic courses into something in the real world.

Again, they receive instant feedback, step-by-step solution, instruction, and practice. Finally, our growth mindset content provides a structured way for students to explore the idea that they, in fact, can learn anything. It includes units on the brain and learning, working through frustration, and making and learning from mistakes and setting goals. It includes instruction in the form of videos and articles for students and also includes teacher resources that you as a parent can use to help guide your student through these growth mindset activities.

If you're looking for more tips and best practices for remote learning, we also have some resources around seven tips for effective remote learning to help support students, teachers, and parents during this time. Now we know many of you have questions, and we're going to take the time now to go through those questions as I hand it over to Dan. But please feel free that if we don't get to your question or if you have additional ones to reach out to our Help Center, where we have answers to frequently asked questions as well as a community space.

Thank you, Megan. Hi everyone, I'm Dan and I'll be moderating the live portion of this Q&A, and I wanted to give a shout-out to Roy for manning the submitted questions. Before we kind of get into the live section, as Megan said, we have a limited amount of time, so we're not going to get to everybody, but rest assured afterwards the team does look over the questions and we try to surface the ones that are really important that are frequently asked, and we do update those documents as we go along.

So the two steps that we'd ask you to follow before we go to the live question portion is first go out to the handout sections of this presentation and grab the download. It contains guidance through everything that Megan just walked through, between an overview of the available content for middle schoolers to the suggested schedules and the framework, and you can always modify those to meet your needs, as well as many of you have seen links throughout the presentation, and so you'll have links to all those resources as well.

Then a second thing I'd ask, if you have any questions, please put them in the question box now and I'll do the facilitating while Megan actually does the hard work of answering the questions. Alright, so we have quite a few questions already coming in. We have one that actually I can answer first, which is: Is the suggested reading list available on the site someplace?

So right now, in the daily schedules, we do have some lists of recommended reading, recommended books. We are early next week going to have a separate page with an updated reading list organized by category, so come back on probably Tuesday or Wednesday, and we'll have that available for you all.

So Megan, we have a question from Jacqueline who asks, "What does mastery enabled course content mean on slide two?" I think that's a fantastic question and we get that question a lot.

Yeah, thanks Dan. Jacqueline, that is a really common question and a really important one, so bear with me, this is going to take a minute to go over. So when we think about Khan Academy and the way we encourage students to learn, we're really founded in the principles of mastery learning, that students learn at their own time and pace if given the right content that fits their needs. So that students can either fill in gaps in areas that they might have struggled with or mislearned in the past and can also accelerate ahead to areas that they're really strong in.

Because Khan Academy is founded on this belief of mastery learning, our courses that are mastery enabled – and we're working to bring even more of our courses to be what we call mastery enabled – allows students to see specifically how they're doing in each individual skill, the unit, and the entire course by using those practice exercises and assessments in the form of quizzes, tests, and course challenges.

Students move from not started to attempted to familiar to proficient and mastered. All those levels mean how well the student is demonstrating their understanding of an individual skill. For students to achieve those high levels of mastery, they have to be able to demonstrate their understanding of a skill in multiple ways. When we say a course is mastery enabled, it means it has all of these pieces that allow a student to learn at their own pace and to demonstrate their understanding so that they are able to understand areas where they may need more support or areas where they're ready to move ahead.

Great! So Megan, this is kind of just pretty related. A question from Yvette asks, "If my children are in a GATE program, a gifted and talented education program, how would I determine which courses are best for them?" I think this is a question whether your child is in an advanced state or if your child needs some remediation in a specific subject. I think it's relevant for multiple audiences.

Yeah, you're absolutely right, and this is a question we get, obviously for gifted and talented students, but I think for all students parents, you're being asked a really tough challenge right now: Where does my student start at the moment? This has been something that your teachers have been working with your students all year, but now you're kind of dropped into the middle.

So our first recommendation is look for guidance from teachers. If the teachers have provided specific guidance on where the student might already be working, definitely leverage that. So if you know your student is in an Algebra course and they're part of the way through, I would recommend looking at the Algebra course and then taking the course challenge. What the student does is they get a mixed review of questions and it'll highlight very quickly areas for the student to work on and areas that they already know the content.

If you don't have a good idea of where your student might be based on email or feedback from the teacher or the course they’re registered for, then you can either look at something like grade level content. Our courses for math, in particular, are broken out by grade level. So if you had a sixth-grade student, we might recommend that you start them on sixth grade or you can start them a grade behind if you feel like you know that there are a lot of gaps for them.

The other alternative is to look at some of our courses that cover from a couple of different grade levels, so things like arithmetic that cover multiple grade levels and give students a better idea of where they might fall. But again, I would circle back to if you have recommendations from your teachers; they know your students really well, so I would start there and then recommend on grade level if you feel like your student needs to step back or move ahead. Again, they can use those components of the course itself to either spend more time on specific learning using videos and articles and then engaging with the practice, or if you feel like they're really strong, they can accelerate quickly by using the unit tests or the course challenges.

I would just add, Megan, that it doesn't hurt to review materials that your child’s already proficient in. In fact, one of our teacher educators, Tim Vandenberg, recommends for his class he starts everyone at kindergarten level and just has them quickly roll through the course and really hit there so that they can progress and kind of fill in the Swiss cheese gaps that they have, and so everyone kind of really learns at their own pace.

That's great, Dan, and we find with teachers, and we think at the beginning of the year we often encourage them to engage with something similar so that students can build confidence in using Khan Academy with something they already know before they get into challenging material.

So Megan, we have a question from Matilda who asks, "For the math program, do you recommend the students start with the unit test or quiz before they do the practice first, just to see what they already know, or just start from top to bottom doing the practices and going down the list?"

Sure, I think it's a little bit of preference. Some students really prefer to build up their confidence with individual skills first and then go to the unit test because the unit test will cover all the skills in the unit and that can be really intimidating for students. However, in this unique situation that we're in right now, if you're not sure where to start with your students or they think they might know part of it, then if you're not sure where the student should start, I would recommend starting with the course challenge or the unit test to help the student identify what they should focus on.

If they already know what unit they are working in, then I might recommend going from top to bottom because it's designed for students to build confidence and build skills on top of each other so that they feel really confident and can make great progress.

Great! So Megan, these next series of questions, one from Lillian and one from Mita, I think all parents are asking this question, is really around like how much parental assistance would you recommend or would you say is required to help your child through these courses?

So I think that's a really tough question. First of all, we all know you're doing double or triple duty right now, being a full-time parent, a full-time employee, and now a full-time teacher. So one, we're definitely not expecting you to know all of the content for your student’s math course, science course, or computer programming course, whatever it is they're using Khan Academy for.

We do find that if you want a little more content knowledge, we're finding a lot of parents find it really kind of challenging but exciting to learn alongside their student. I was a classroom teacher for nine years and I can say that one of the most exciting things for my students was to admit like, "You know what? I don't know the answer to that. Why don't we work through it together?"

So if you're looking to give support, don't be afraid to engage with your students and say, "You know what? I don't remember how to multiply fractions," like that's totally fine. It gives you an opportunity to show them you know, you never stop learning and something to learn with them. The idea with the schedules, I think to address that question a little more directly is the schedules are designed to help the students stay on pace, but they're still going to need support from someone else. Khan Academy, while a wonderful tool, is not meant to replace the teacher entirely.

We do recommend that there is some support given to the student as they work through this. If you can encourage your student to work within that schedule or maybe take time to discuss the reading you're doing together and maybe some of that recommended reading, so it is meant to be used with a parent or guardian or some sort of supporting figure along with them, though we would think at the middle school age level they would be able to follow a great majority of this by themselves.

Yeah, and I would just add on to that, Megan, like I think where the parents, where you as parents are particularly useful in this case is to help provide structure for your learners. I don't think, you know, it's been a while since I've done any geometry or algebra, so it's not like we expect you to remember how to do differential equations off the top of your head. I think it's more about helping the schedule and helping to motivate your child and providing that level of support versus actual subject expertise.

That's excellent! So Megan, we have a question around, would you mind from Diane, "Would you mind sharing where we can find the course challenge in order to identify where the learning gaps and successes are?"

Sure, no problem! So I'm actually going to move over to the Khan Academy site and I believe you all should be able to see my screen in just a minute. I think this is a really important question because we do often offer this as guidance. If you don't know where your student should start, they can take the course challenge.

Let's take Algebra 1 for example. If I'm a student and I select "Courses" in the top left of my site, I can see all the courses that are available to me as a student. Then let's say I'm going to take Algebra 1, and I choose Algebra 1 from the course list, this will bring me to the course page for Algebra and shows me all of the content that's available. If I scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, you'll see this box that says "Course Challenge." Here, if I click "Start Course Challenge," it'll pop up with 30 questions that are on skills throughout the course.

Here I'll be offered, again, 30 questions that cover a variety of skills throughout the entire course. We do expect this to take most students 30 to 45 minutes to complete, so this is where you feel like is the best place for your student to start. Make sure they have enough time to do so, and I would also recommend that they have a couple of tools with them, things like pencil and paper or a whiteboard because they're probably going to need some space to work through those problems.

Once they complete the course challenge, it'll show them in the results some skills that they're really strong with and some skills where they might need some more support. What will happen in the course itself is they'll have indicators with kind of little sparkly star marks of areas for them to focus on, so students know after they take the course challenge within Khan Academy itself they'll know where to focus their time.

Great! So here's a question that actually I can answer, a question from Lauren. The question is, "How should I use this as a supplement to what our school district is giving?" In terms of how to use this, we created these schedules early on in this process before others were made available. So we were really trying to fill a void that we saw that existed out there.

We would say recommend you defer to your school district's recommendations first and actually really modify this to fit your needs as well. So if there are gaps that you feel like you want your child to follow, do that, but this by no means is meant to kind of override what your school district or your school is advising. Great question though!

So Megan, we have a question from Vivian who asks, "Hi, I'm the mother of an eighth grader who's quarantined at home right now. I'd like to know what good strategies I can use to help my child stay motivated in learning. She's sloppy with her schoolwork because most of the assignments are not mandatory."

Yeah, I think this is something that is not exclusive to parents right now. We're seeing this with a lot of our teachers. First of all, middle school is really hard, and it's hard to keep students motivated even in the classroom, let alone now that they're, you know, working remotely and then you as a parent are trying to instill in them the commitment to still learning when they're not in the physical brick-and-mortar space.

Some things we're finding are motivating are, you know, with students either sharing maybe that connection to what things that are they learning are to, you know, greater things in life. One of the more external ones that we're finding teachers are doing this, but I think it's applicable to anyone, is finding ways to motivate their students in things like doing challenges or little fun videos or fun activities that maybe are outside even your own comfort zone to get students to say, “You know, if you’re willing to make 10% progress in seventh-grade math, if you make that progress, I as your parent will let you paint my fingernails green," or, you know, things that you can't necessarily buy but might be really funny.

We've seen a teacher, for example, do the TikTok flip, where their daughter was putting on makeup and then he changes and he's putting on the makeup instead. Just funny little things that are again, really appealing to your student or your child that again, it's not necessarily even like bribery per se, but something that's really creative or something like that that might engage them to say like, "Oh, I'm putting in this effort and you're putting in the effort with me to do so."

The other thing that I'll circle back to that we talked about earlier that we find is motivating for students is someone willing to learn alongside them. Again, that idea that we definitely wouldn't expect you to remember all of your geometry or seventh-grade math, but that you're open with your student and saying, "Why don't we learn this together? Why don't we go back and learn something together?" or "If you learn your math, maybe we'll sit down and try this intro to JavaScript class together and learn something new together." So making it something that you are doing as a family as opposed to something that the student has to do in isolation.

Great! Thank you! We have two questions that are kind of related around the breadth and extent of our content. So Deborah asks, "Do your grade level classes cover an entire year's worth of questions?" and then kind of related to that, Marcy is asking, "Once their child completes all of the eighth-grade course challenges, will Khan Academy automatically move them up to the next level?"

When we talk about the breadth and depth of our content, most of the courses are expected to take a full year. If you're looking at a full math course, like sixth, seventh, or eighth-grade math, that is expected to cover all of the skills or the great majority of skills that are in that course according to Common Core State Standards. So all of our courses are Common Core State Standard aligned, and the breadth of that is what is expected for that course completion.

The answer to that is yes, it's supposed to take that long. When we have teachers work on things like setting a goal for students on what they would expect to complete for the year, we expect them getting to 80 or 90% of mastery would be what we would expect students to accomplish in a whole year. So I wouldn't expect your student to complete all of seventh-grade math in the next three weeks. That seems like a really unattainable ask.

And, I'm sorry again, what's the second part of that question again?

So the question is once, you know, the first part was do we have enough to cover the whole school year, which is the answer is yes. The second question is if their child does complete the whole grade, all of eighth grade, for example, do they automatically move on to the next level?

Great! So students are encouraged to go to the next level. However, students have access to all of the content at all times. So if students are working on, let's say, seventh-grade content, and they see that they are struggling on particular skills, we have the opportunity to go back and look at the foundational skills for that in sixth grade or fifth grade, and they can access that content at any time.

The same thing is true for moving ahead. So while they, when they finish seventh grade, they're encouraged to move to eighth grade, the program won't force them to do so but they're encouraged to go to eighth grade, and they could continue to go to algebra one and geometry so that they have access to the entire library of content at any time, anywhere. So that once students complete one thing, they're able to move on to something else, so they never run out of content to study.

Yep, and just as much as they can advance for it if they feel like they need to remediate something in the past, they can always look at last year's content as well and do that type of review.

So Megan, I think we have time for one more question and a lot of parents are interested in this. So Jennifer asks, "Is there a way to follow the child's progress remotely?"

Very important question and yes! There are a couple of ways you can do that, but we recommend you create a parent account and then you can link your parent account to your child's student account, and you can follow their progress. So you can know what they're working on, how much time they're spending on it, and what progress they're making.

For more information on that, again, while we didn't cover it in this webinar, it's included in the slides as a link to our Parent Quick Start Guide, and that will walk you through how to set up a parent account and you can connect that to your student or if you have more than one child students and you're able to follow their progress and their learning experience on Khan Academy.

Perfect! Well, thank you, Megan, for sharing your expertise with our audience. And then thank you, our audience, for taking the time out of your busy evening to be with us. We know you're extremely busy during this period of time and we really appreciate you investing your time into this session.

As we mentioned at the start of this, if you, we didn't have time to answer your questions, don't worry, we'll follow up in terms of an FAQ and whatnot. If you missed something and want to review, we will be posting a recording of this webinar as well as the presentation that you saw here and make it available online for those of you who registered for this webinar. You will automatically be emailed this information.

If you know of other people who would be interested in this information, please go to khanacademy.org and you can always share out the links to friends and family who might be interested as well. Before we sign off, I wanted to mention that we were able to do this webinar as a result of some terrific partners: Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, and Novartis, who really are stepping up and helping us make resources like this available to you all.

And then, before we sign off, we ask one more favor of you all. So first, if at the end of this presentation a pop-up will appear and we ask that if you could provide us feedback on how to make future iterations of this session even better for you all. And then secondly, we ask feedback on what kind of sessions you'd like to hear next.

We created this session, actually, as a response and feedback from our first high-level presentation where many of you asked for more specifics around a schedule as well as how to find content. Rest assured, we are definitely listening to your feedback and we definitely want to create more valuable resources for you, and we're here to support you.

So in closing, we just wanted to recognize that you're juggling a lot right now, both as parents, educators, as well as working adults, and this is really uncharted territory for all of us. We here at Khan Academy just want to remind you to be kind to yourselves. It's okay to miss one thing or another, and we're here to help you. We just know that you've got this! So from all of us at Khan Academy, thanks again and good night.