Homeroom with Sal & Linda Darling-Hammond - Thursday, August 20

Hi everyone, Sal here from Khan Academy. Welcome to our homeroom live stream. I'm very excited about the conversation we're going to have with Linda Darling-Hammond. Before we jump into that, I'll give my standard announcements first.

A reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We can only exist and do the work we do because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So if you believe in a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere—which I hope you do—please think about going to khanacademy.org/donate.

I also want to give a special shout out to several organizations that stepped up, especially as COVID was hitting. We were already running at a deficit before COVID, and as you can imagine, our server costs have gone up dramatically. We're trying to accelerate a whole series of programs and various efforts, and so our deficits only grew. To help us close some of that: a special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, Novartis, and actually the Amgen Foundation as well, and many other supporters, foundations, and corporations that have helped Khan Academy get to the point that we could be of service during this crisis.

Now with that, I'm really excited to introduce our guest, Linda Darling-Hammond, who I would describe on many dimensions: Stanford professor—hopefully she considers me a friend—a president of the California State Board of Education, and the founding president of the Learning Policy Institute. So, Linda, thanks for joining us.

Linda: Happy to be here.

Sal: So maybe a first question. I encourage anyone who's watching, if you have questions for Linda, who's an expert really in all things education and beyond, put your questions on the message board on Facebook and YouTube, and we have team members who will help surface it to Linda and myself. But maybe a starting point is given the crisis that we're in around the COVID distance learning, where do you think we are in this journey? How are you thinking about it? What do you think are the most pressing issues right now?

Linda: Well, there are several issues. I mean, one is obviously because we are in distance learning, doing that as well as we can possibly do it. And that means, of course, closing the digital divide. We're working hard on that in California. It means being sure that teachers have the training to use the tools and materials well—synchronous and asynchronous instruction in the right ways. It also means social and emotional wraparound supports. Kids are going through a lot of trauma in many communities, and the experience that kids are having is very disparate. Some kids are home with parents who can work at home; others are having to be home while their parents are at work. Some have parents unemployed; there are health crises in a number of communities. So whatever we're doing on distance learning has to have a social and emotional support component to it. Figuring out what kids need, making sure that the school resources to support those needs are also available—counseling and other kinds of resources. And then getting solid distance learning mounted. It’s happening in some very creative ways in some districts across the country, and certainly in California.

Sal: And what would you say, you know, given that I completely agree? Because there's been so much conversation about do schools open or do they go to distance learning or not, that it feels like there's been a little bit of a gap in clear guidance on what good or even adequate distance learning looks like. Do you have examples of places that are doing it well that could be emulated by other places, or just general guidelines?

Linda: Well, the California Department of Education just released some guidance this week on distance learning that does sort of summarize what some of the research shows matters in distance learning. And then there are districts across the state that are doing really exciting work. Among the things that matter are having everyone sort of on a common platform, training parents as well as students as well as teachers on how to access the materials and so on, having interactive instruction synchronously. It’s not like just the sage on the stage; it's being sure that the things that are being communicated can be discussed among kids in breakout rooms and, you know, in chats and so on. Being sure that interactive element is there.

Having good materials for asynchronous instruction—and you're of course familiar with the Khan Academy materials that a lot of districts are using, and there are others across content areas. When those themselves are well scaffolded, when we've done the right kind of assessment to tell kids where to tune in on the things that they need to work on, and then bring it back in line with the teacher and the peers for further discussion, you can get very substantial gains in learning if you've got all of those components in place. And that's what we're trying to make sure is happening.

Long Beach is a place in California that's doing really interesting work around this—San Diego, many others. I will say in Long Beach, one of the things I love—and they are actually, it happens, using some Khan materials—but they're having teachers teach in ways, and this is similar to your approach, to reaching everyone. The great teachers who are really good on certain topic areas are giving courses and lessons anyone can tune into. Sometimes thousands of kids tune in to teachers who are teaching particular things. Other teachers can tune in and learn the strategies that that teacher is using, and then, you know, they can use the materials that are available for practice and for the next stages. So there are ways that the technology can really leverage great teaching and materials that we couldn't do when we were just in single classrooms.

Sal: That's super valuable. A school district that we've been working very closely with at Khan Academy for many years, and they have a recently retiring superintendent, Chris Teinhauser. But the whole team there, they've really been always one of the most innovative school districts in here. And actually, that project—that's actually a little skunk works or at least aspects of what you described—is that I've been working on with them, which is...

Linda: I did not know that! I did not know that!

Sal: Well, maybe there's multiple projects, but yeah, we're doing exactly that—so that any of some of their top teachers in the district can set up group sessions that any kid in the district can attend. So you're no longer tied to your specific zip code or neighborhood anymore, and they've had some where 2,000 kids have shown up because they—you know, teachers can be famous just like movie stars for the amazing work that they do. And, you know, people can get that experience. I think it's, you know, this is all about inventing and sharing. That's what this moment in history is about—is to, you know, human beings invent. That's what we do, you know, we inquire and we invent, and then we've got to share what we're learning.

Linda: Just to double-click on that a second, you know, everything you said makes all the sense in the world and is very much aligned with a lot of what we've been talking about as well. But if I'm a teacher, you know, I’m used to doing, let’s say, five days a week an hour a day; maybe I spend some time, you know, grading papers, etc., at home and lesson planning. How does it... you know, I think the guidance around making the video conferencing sessions more interactive—but does it become, you know, five one-hour video conference sessions a week? What would you recommend that teacher do? Do they do fewer shorter ones? Should they do smaller groups? Or should they just experiment and see what works?

Linda: Well, you know, it does depend on the age level of the kids, as well as what the kids have had before. So, you know, it’s a really challenging thing. And I just want to say this: If you're teaching little kids and you’re trying to do it online, that’s very challenging because they're squirrely and so on. But that’s where you need a lot more interactive, you know, kind of materials—very short sessions, you know, interspersed with some physical activity. You know, you’re doing some PE in the middle of the time that you’re working; you may have low-budget art kinds of things that everybody can engage in if you're working with smaller kids, for example, in the middle of the instruction, where you're also reading to them.

But generally speaking, modest amounts of direct instruction, short amounts of that with lots of opportunities for interactions. You know, the Zoom breakout room is a wonderful thing, and when kids get old enough and have been taught how to work in groups, you know, you can pose some information, you can pose the problem, you can pose the question, send them off to work on it and talk about it for a while, have them come back and share their solutions if it's in a math or science context, or their ideas, their decisions in a debate context. You can have them engaged in debates and projects. Some of the asynchronous time can also be done collectively because a lot of education is, you know, doing things both individually and then talking about it with others.

And teaching kids how to manage their own learning, this is an opportunity for us to help kids take agency in learning and to really teach them how to set up their own, you know, sort of learning management systems, how to use the materials that they're going to use asynchronously well so that they're learning how to learn because that's the critical skill for 21st-century society—is, you know, being a self-managing learner. This is the time to get away from transmission teaching, which is I'm talking and you're just writing it down and spitting it back on a test, towards, you know, teaching kids to be increasingly engaged in self-managing in their learning. And we've seen that the schools that are project-based schools, where kids are engaged in doing projects individually and collectively, have had hardly missed a beat in the switch to online because the kids were already learning how to plan and manage parts of their learning. They were devoted to their projects because they cared about them; they were preparing their presentations. Part of the homework sometimes is to go present it to your grandparents. I love that kind of homework because I'm a grandmother. And, you know, you want your kids to have audiences for their work, and so they present in a variety of ways. But then the formal presentations at the end of the year often, you know, to a broader audience. In one case in Oakland, the kids have been working on a safety plan for their school because it was a very dangerous school to get to, and their last end-of-year presentation was to the city council, who actually took up some new policies to make it safer for kids to get to school. So when they do go live, they'll have a, you know, new path to get there.

Sal: So, I think that's part of it—keeping kids engaged in ways that they really care about and helping them learn to be more and more able to manage their own learning.

Linda: And what's interesting about everything you just mentioned is those sound like best practices even if we're doing in-person learning, you know—make the students interact as much as possible, have them take agency, have them apply what they're doing, maybe have an audience to see the artifacts of their work. Do you see— I guess, what do you see are the—what are your biggest fears about the situation that we're in right now? And do you see some silver linings? Maybe one of them is that some of these practices become more mainstream.

Linda: Well, of course there are fears. I mean, we have a huge equity gap in this country. I mean, it's—you know, we fund schools inequitably. We have a huge income gap. The communities that are being affected by COVID in the Black and Brown communities that have been hit employment-wise and health-wise and in a variety of ways, those are huge, huge problems that we confront all the time, and they are exacerbated right now. So the other piece of what's needed—and we saw this too—the schools that were community schools that had social workers and wraparound health and mental health services already engaged in school were able to meet the needs of the families in a much better way. We've got to do that. A lot of districts are doing one-on-one, even distance, socially-distanced home visits, you know, where that's needed, as well as one-on-one on the phone and on the Zoom and in other ways to connect with families and be sure that kids are getting what they need.

We're going to need distance learning hubs. San Francisco is putting up distance learning hubs for 6,000 kids, where they can come to a place where they can get food and they can get equipment, and they can be online, and they can also have counselors and social workers and others to be available to be sure that their whole child needs are being met. So that's the biggest fear: is that we won't step up and be sure that kids are, you know, surrounded with all of the care that they need. But it is happening, and I'm just very inspired by the way that educators and others are stepping up.

The silver linings are very interesting because, you know, if you go back to the beginning of March, we had this digital divide where about 30 percent of kids, 20 to 30 percent, either didn't have connectivity or devices that they could use at home. In California, we've probably closed that divide by about half. We have five billion dollars going out to schools right now as part of the federal money, as well as a lot of corporations, of course, stepping up. A lot of districts went into their reserves and bought computers. A lot of companies are figuring out how to get digital access in much more reasonable ways. We should and could have closed the digital divide by the end of this year. Well, that wasn't going to happen unless we had that necessity.

We will have teachers and students and other staff technologically proficient in ways that would not have happened unless we had to do that. And if you think about our economy in California—and I don't mean to leave out the rest of the country; this is true elsewhere also—you know, the technological underpinnings of the economy are growing at an exponential rate. So the fact that we're going to have a technologically proficient populace that cuts across lines of class and income in ways that wouldn't have previously is, you know, a huge gain. We need to take advantage of it, and people are learning to teach in new ways that we need to capture, understand, share, and take advantage of.

Sal: That makes a ton of sense, and we're getting a ton of questions here on social media. And, you know, one question—and this is a question that I have—I’ll add a little bit too from Facebook. Zahedzia is asking, "I'm struggling." It sounds like Zaya is a teacher. "I'm struggling on how to perform quick formative assessment in a virtual classroom." For those of y'all who aren't used to the language, formative assessment is assessment as kids are learning so that a teacher can understand how well they've learned the material and where they might need extra help. And I'll extend that question, you know, a lot of the school districts last year had to just go to pass-fail because they're like, you know, we—it's not everyone has equal access. Even now, I'm hearing a lot of teachers are struggling with science question or how do I do assessments in a world where I—you know, I can't proctor them? You know, and this is all happening at the same time that things like standardized assessments are getting difficult to administer.

So is there kind of an information gap that's developing because of this crisis?

Linda: We need information about how kids are doing and about how kids are learning. Yeah, there may be. I do think that we can help teachers with tools for formative and diagnostic assessment. One of the things we did in California, it’s on the CDE website, is guidance around using diagnostic formative assessments. And we've approved in the state about probably a dozen different formative and diagnostic assessment tools and programs that people can access. Some districts are using them regularly so that you can see where kids are on a regular basis. A lot of them are very short assessments. The Smarter Balanced assessment system has all kinds of formative and interim assessment tools. They're freely available to every teacher, public and private schools that you can— and you can burrow in on a topic area to see where kids are kind of, you know, in a domain as well as more broadly. And so we want teachers to get to, you know, get familiar with how to use these tools. They don't require proctoring; they don't require, you know, some special testing context. They just require the time and the tools right there for kids, and then you can guide your instruction accordingly.

And they usually scale across the entire K through 8 or 12 scale of progress, and then you can figure out what materials you need to use. The other thing, of course, are formative assessments that teachers would do themselves. It's a little harder perhaps, you know, when you've got a video screen of kids, you know, to check for understanding. But you can use the chat box; you can use exit tickets out the door at the end of the class and say, you know, answer this question, tell me what you understood or what you didn't understand, and begin to get those kinds of tools directly in the mix for the way in which the learning takes place.

Sal: And then how would you handle assessment in terms of even giving students grades? You know, for maybe the K through 8 crowd, that’s not as important—the grades are a little bit lower stakes—but obviously as you go into high school, folks really start caring about grades, especially as it shows up on their transcripts. It's being used for things like college admissions. How should a teacher think about it? Authenticating students—should they just go to a real honor code? Are there ways to ensure that, you know, there isn't some shady behavior going on, you know, other people taking the test, or getting help, things like that?

Linda: Well, you know, I do think that we need to be thinking in honor code terms in general in society and in life. And one of my kids went to college based on the fact that they had an honor code because they wanted to be really in a place that was ethically, you know, organized around that idea. The more we use authentic assessments, the more kids have to sort of produce and defend and explain what they've done and show it, the less you have to worry about cheating. It's kind of like the driver's test in the DMV, you know. You might be able to figure out how to cheat on the multiple-choice test, but you’ve got to get in that car and you’ve got to drive with the driver and, you know, show that you can do, you know, all the things on the driver’s test. Now, in New York, they have a higher standard because you have to parallel park as well as everything else.

But you know, it is authentic, and I think the more we work with authentic assessments of learning that kids present and defend, the more you can see that they've really learned it. And I think that's the direction we should be going. It’s the direction that the advanced placement assessments, the international baccalaureate and others have been going in for some years. In terms of grades, my view is that we should always be honoring the learning. And the goal is to see what you can get to, not privilege people who've had more experience with something who get there faster. So I believe in— and this is very well documented in the research—if you give people the opportunity to, you know, get instruction, try an authentic task, get feedback—often using rubrics or other tools—try it again, revise it, that what should count is where you end up in your learning as you've done this opportunity to engage, practice, and improve, rather than where you started.

And that makes it possible for kids who started further behind to show the progress because they’re getting the opportunity to iterate. If you think about anything we do in life that is an actual performance, you know, it's through that process of trying, getting feedback, and trying again. The more we grade like that, the more we actually drive learning upwards for everyone and the more we close the achievement gap.

Sal: I couldn't agree with you more. You know, and you know this, but a lot of our resources at Khan Academy exactly make sure that kids get as much practice, as much feedback, that if they’re in an 80 state, that's not the end of the world—they can keep working on it so that they can eventually get to where they're going. And also, 100% agree on the authentic—you know, I've been brainstorming with some educators, and we might even make this part of that Schoolhouse.world project, where if a student is able to take an assessment on Khan Academy—say a course challenge or unit test—and they're taking a screen capture while they're talking out loud to show their reasoning and then they submit that video, that’s actually very hard to cheat that. And in a lot of ways, you’re going to get a lot more texture than you would have had even with a traditional assessment. So I think there's going to be some models that you're going to get more learning because actually when we explain what we know, we’re actually solidifying it in our brains in a way that, you know, makes it more deeply understood. So I think that's, you know, that’s the way we should be going.

One question for you—this for me—I’ve always wondered, and I don’t know to what degree you have jurisdiction over things like the A to G standards. That’s probably more the University of California regions. But I am curious, you know, that right now, it's—you know, in California, they have the A to G standards. Every state has kind of the—you need this many years of foreign language, this many years of math, this many years of English. In almost every state, in almost every country, it’s still described very much in terms of time—not in terms of outcome. And as you just described, it’s much more valuable to think of things in terms of outcome. Some kids might take a few months; some kids might take a few years to learn it. But if they get to that outcome, that's what matters. Is there a movement? Because I do think these A to G type Carnegie unit type things are actually one of the main blockers to moving to more of a—whatever you want to call it—outcome-based or competency-based world.

Linda: Well, there is a competency-based movement. There's been one for 30 or 40 years, you know. You probably are aware that there are always people talking about this and trying to do it. We are, you know, we’ve kind of been locked in concrete around the system of education that we've had for so long. The courses that are in high school that most people think about, you know, Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, were taken in that order—alphabetical. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, in that order—alphabetical. They're in the A through G system. Those were all developed by the Committee of 10 in 1890. You know, it is time for a new approach.

I'm actually just now joining an international committee that OECD is forming because I've been talking with folks there for a long time about we need to have a new committee to think about what it really means to have a curriculum for the 21st century, which we're well into now, but we haven't caught up kind of in terms of our—and this moment of disruption in the education system is causing people to think what really matters, what should we really be doing here, how do we do it, what's, you know, really important? In addition to, you know, certain kinds of content knowledge for sure, is the habits of mind—the way in which you can learn to learn. You know, more knowledge was created between 1999 and 2003 than in the entire history of the world preceding. Knowledge is exponentially increasing. Technology knowledge is doubling probably faster than every 11 months at this point.

So, people need some understanding of the concepts and structures and factual basis, but they also need a huge amount of capacity to learn to learn. And that's what we should be engendering because they're going to be working with knowledge that hasn't been discovered yet, using technologies that haven't been invented yet, to solve enormous problems in the world that we have not managed to solve. And our way of counting progress in education doesn't take these things into account right now. There are places—New Hampshire is one of them—across the country that's really trying to get to a competency-based system, and there are others that are working on it. But this is the moment to really be asking and trying to answer those questions in new ways.

Sal: Yeah, absolutely. One more question. There's a question from Facebook: Michelle Morales Capriati. And I'll extend her question a little bit. She says, "How do we work to retain teachers at this time?" I know you've done a lot of research in this area. There’s a mass exodus of educators right now due to COVID-related issues, and if you're entering the field, how much of this is on your radar at the state board? And, yeah, what's the solution here?

Linda: Well, you know, we keep educators by valuing them and by supporting them. And so, number one, where schools are open and childcare and other, you know, aspects of the systems—they need to be safe. We actually do know a lot about how to keep them safe. You know, we know about the importance of face coverings, physical distancing, testing and tracking, keeping kids and teachers in small cohorts. In the countries that have kept schools open safely, they've been very diligent about those things, and where we are in environments that infection rates have been brought down, the curve has been bent sufficiently, we need to be sure that teachers are supported in all of those physical ways as well as in all of these sort of intellectual ways to do the work with kids that in ways that can be successful. Same thing is true when we're in distance learning—how to support that work so that it's doable so people have opportunities to learn, so that they're being supported and they’re being respected.

Of course, in teaching, there are also always issues of adequate training and pay because we don't invest in this country in the teaching profession in the way that many other countries do on a regular basis. So all of those things have to be on the table. And again, I think we're at a moment where parents are appreciating educators in ways they didn't before perhaps because they can see how challenging the work is with their one or two or maybe three children in their house—however many they have—and can imagine what it might be to do that with 30 or whatever the number is in a classroom. So I hope we'll see, you know, a redoubling of commitment to the support of the teaching profession.

Sal: Yeah, we couldn't agree more. Well, we're pretty close to time. Maybe in the last minute, any final thoughts? And I am also curious, you know, how is the state board viewing this? Are you all viewing this as a one-year situation? It could be longer, folks I know who know about epidemics are saying we should at least plan for longer. Is that kind of part of the conversation at the state level?

Linda: Well, I think that there's a recognition that we may be in and out of physical school right now. The California government, the Department of Public Health, etc., is getting ready to issue guidance about how small groups can come together safely even when whole schools are not able to be, you know, actualized or in gear. But we may have points in time and we will in different counties where it is safe to go back to school. But then, you know, there’ll be kids who need to be quarantined or something, they’ll have to be on distance learning. So we have to have this flexibility in the ways in which a school is experienced and the purpose of education, even if the place of education changes. And that's why it's so very important to, you know, close the digital divide, help everyone be, you know, actively supported in that work because it's going to be a reality for quite a while.

And even when we get a vaccine, which, you know, people hope for within this year, which will allow us, you know, I think to get back to school in person, we’re going to have fires and floods and hurricanes and other climate-related events that are going to make the physical place of schooling a changeable place. And we will need to be prepared for that to be the way in which we understand that people have to be prepared to learn wherever they are, and that we have to support that in a variety of ways.

Sal: It's a great, a super important message. Well, Linda, thank you so much, and I look forward to continuing this conversation. Hopefully, we get you again on this live stream, and I actually—there's a lot of stuff I would love to keep talking to you about, of how we could partner together to help teachers and families around—not just California, but the country.

Linda: Thank you so much, Sal. Pleasure to be here.

Sal: Thanks. Everyone, again, for joining this live stream—hopefully you found this conversation as interesting as I did. I always comment about how fast the time goes. There are many questions; my apologies that I wasn't able to get to. I will make an announcement: We have another leader in education next Tuesday. John King, former U.S. Secretary of Education, is going to be joining us, and as you can imagine, we're going to be talking about a lot of the same issues—about how do we do distance learning right? What are going to be the implications? Are there going to be some silver linings? How do we navigate all of this together? So I look forward for you all to join on Tuesday. So with that, stay safe, and I will see you in the future live stream.