Khan Academy Ed Talk with Mike Flanagan

Hello and welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy. I'm Kristin Disarro, the Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy, and I am excited today to talk to Mike Flanagan, the CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium. We'll find out what that is and what it means for mastery learning to have such an organization.

Before we get started, a couple of things: Khan Academy is a non-profit organization, and we do rely on donors like you to help us keep doing the work we do. If you go to khanacademy.org/donate, you will find a place where you can make a contribution to help us keep doing the work that we're doing.

Second, we do want to thank some of our supporters who have helped us with the COVID-19 crisis response, including AT&T, General Motors, and Fastly. Next, if you want to listen to other conversations that I've had, or that Sal has had with interesting guests, you can find us where you get your podcasts at "Homeroom with Sal," the podcast. So you can tune in and listen.

And with that, I am excited to welcome Mike Flanagan. Welcome!

Mike Flanagan: Greetings! Delighted to be here.

Kristin Disarro: Excellent! So I will start from the beginning. You're the CEO of Mastery Transcript Consortium. I bet when you were a kid, that wasn't quite what you said you wanted to be when you grew up. What is your career trajectory that brought you here?

Mike Flanagan: Yeah, that's true. It would be a really interesting kind of toddler walking around being like, "I want to lead a non-profit association of schools." Yeah, so I started my career as an English teacher. I taught at an independent school in Honolulu, Hawaii, and I taught there for three years, and it was about as cool as it sounds. It was really great! I moved from teaching to starting on the path of academia, and then I did a pivot, and I wound up in technology. I actually wound up doing a bunch of startup companies both with some college classmates, a college classmate of mine, and other friends along the way.

And then things came full circle where I've now sort of wound up in this role that is a really interesting hybrid of teaching, pedagogy, schools, and technology. Yeah, it wasn't a linear path, but it's one that landed me here, and I'm pretty excited about it. I think that idea of non-linear paths is actually probably a pretty good fit for a lot of the things we think about in terms of our schools and the way we try and serve kids.

Kristin Disarro: That totally makes sense! I always say the path of my career—I can tell the story looking backwards, it makes sense, but at any given point it seems like I was making some left turns or some weird shifts.

Mike Flanagan: Yeah!

Kristin Disarro: So it's also Teacher Appreciation Week this week, so before we get started talking about your work, are there any teachers that you'd like to recognize from your past?

Mike Flanagan: Yeah! I grew up—I was in high school. I was just—I loved school, right? It was my happy place. But I was very much a STEM kid, and so my high school science teacher, Mr. Ezekiel, who taught me AP Chemistry, probably started me on the road to teaching. When it was time for us to get ready for the AP, he broke the textbook into different chunks and gave each of us responsibility to teach one. He gave me organic chemistry, and the light bulb went on. I realized I was so much more comfortable and confident; I really had owned the material because I had to explain it to somebody else. That sense of how do you step out of yourself and really figure out how to make this make sense to other people—the light bulb really went on for me in a lot of different ways. So Mr. Ezekiel, if you're out there, thank you!

Kristin Disarro: Awesome! Excellent! So let's talk Mastery Transcript Consortium. What is that? Tell us what it is and what you do.

Mike Flanagan: Yeah, so we're a non-profit, and what we really are is a collection of innovative schools. We've got a network of just about 400 high schools, mostly here in the U.S., some international. What our schools have in common is the concept of mastery learning, and we will unpack mastery learning, I’m sure, throughout this discussion...