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 the 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 like that brought you here?

Mike Flanagan: Yeah, that's true. It would be a really interesting kind of toddler walking around saying, "I want to lead a non-profit association of schools." Um, yeah, I started my career as an English teacher. I taught at an independent school in Honolulu, Hawaii, and I taught there for three years. It was about as cool as it sounds. It was really great.

I moved from teaching and began on the path of academia, and then I did a pivot. I wound up in technology and actually did a bunch of startup companies with some college classmates and other friends along the way. Then, things came full circle, and I've now landed in this role, which is a really interesting hybrid of teaching, pedagogy, schools, and technology. 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 probably a 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 my career path, 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.

Yeah, 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 when I was in high school. I loved school, right? It was my happy place, but I was very much a STEM kid. 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 had each of us take responsibility to teach one. He gave me organic chemistry. The light bulb went on; I realized that I was so much more comfortable and confident that I really had owned the material because I had to explain it to someone else. That sense of how do you step out of yourself and figure out how to make this make sense to other people? The light bulb really went on for me in many different ways. So, Mr. Ezekiel, if you're out there, thank you!

Kristin Disarro: Awesome! Excellent. So, let's talk about the 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. We will unpack mastery learning throughout this discussion, but really at its core, it's an embrace of real learner-centered pedagogy and a rethinking of assessment that's centered on the idea— which shouldn't be radical but kind of is— that all children are capable of learning.

It's our job as school leaders and system leaders to create structures and supports to ensure that they are all doing the work and really mastering this material at the highest level. What happens— and this is where things get interesting—this is where the transcript comes in and also the consortium is that if you lead a really innovative school and you're adopting a bunch of the models that we'll discuss, you're basically going to stop producing a lot of the metrics that we think of as high school.

If you're giving credit based on mastery proficiency, it's a really important tenet of mastery learning. The basic idea is: don't give credit based on the number of hours students have been exposed to a subject; give them credit when they've actually nailed it. Some students will do it more quickly; some will need more time. But once you do that, you're not giving credit based on the Carnegie unit anymore; you're not giving credit based on credit hours.

When you think about the way we assess students—traditional grading kind of assumes that kids will be distributed on a curve: some kids are good at school, some kids are not. Mastery learning rejects that principle. We basically say, no, all kids are capable of learning. Some will learn faster than others, and that’s fine, but they can all be really proficient. Some will even be advanced.

In that kind of model, what is a C minus? A C minus doesn’t even exist anymore in those models. So you take these two things—credit hours and traditional grades—you put those in the parking lot, and then you also take this idea of what is school? What should kids be learning? Traditional transcripts really think about classic academic subjects: English, math, science, social studies. There’s nothing wrong with those things; they’re great.

But there’s a lot more that we want kids to learn and be excellent at, particularly if we’re going to prepare them for a really interesting and maybe volatile and uncertain future. We want to give them 21st-century skills. We want to provide opportunities for deep interdisciplinary learning. There’s literally no place to capture those kinds of 21st-century competencies in a traditional transcript.

So, what you have is this really odd phenomenon where schools that are in some ways being the best possible school that brain science says you can design are now producing kids with student records that don’t make any sense to colleges. Because colleges are used to thinking about credits, grades, and the classic academic disciplines, that’s a big issue. As a parent and an educator, I think these schools are awesome. I want as many of them as possible to grow and propagate around the country. I want every kid to have access to one.

But if the message is, oh, you can go to this really innovative school, but you might not get into college because you look different—that's not going to be good for adoption. College is not the only, or most even important, destination, but it’s definitely a blocking issue. If we cannot show that these innovative schools can still give kids access to higher ed campuses, that's going to be bad for us as system change agents.

So that’s what the transcript is designed to do. It’s a translation tool that takes the models our schools have and, through our best effort, presents them to higher ed in a way that’s interactive, usable, and hopefully makes a lot of sense. It helps them understand sort of where these K-12 schools are headed.

Kristin Disarro: Got it. That makes sense. So, to unpack some of that, let's start with the pedagogy and the mastery learning piece. Part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is because Khan Academy also really believes in that idea of it's okay to fail your first attempt. It's not about what score you get on one attempt; it's about reaching a high level of proficiency on the skill and how you get there. What are some of the foundational things that you see as key tenets for mastery learning?

Mike Flanagan: Well, I mean, there’s foundational and then there’s also sort of what becomes possible. Foundational is definitely this idea of students progress when they've mastered a particular skill and not before. If you’re going to do that, it necessitates a more personalized approach. You can’t have kids learning at different rates and then expect them all to move in lockstep.

Fundamentally, it doesn’t compute. So that has implications for your school day, your school schedule, and it implies certain technologies to reduce the administrative burden on school leaders and faculty. But at the end of the day, a personalized approach is really key.

Thinking about those cross-disciplinary 21st-century competencies and skills—finding ways of re-centering those into what kids do and helping them understand that a lot of things that used to be tacit in school, like what does it mean to be a good leader, what does it mean to collaborate effectively on a team, what does it mean to be creative or to solve problems creatively—those aren’t intangible things; they can be taught.

You can describe, to a pretty high level of precision, what good performance looks like in those things. If you start exposing kids to those things as early as eighth or ninth grade, there’s no reason why they all can't get to really high levels of performance by the time they leave high school, instead of focusing on your academic subjects and hoping they sort of pick up that stuff along the way.

So those two things—21st-century skills that are cross-disciplinary, credit based on proficiency not seat time—those are the essentials. Then what becomes possible is a lot of opportunities for kids to engage in deeper, purpose-driven learning.

If you have students given more choice because they're on a more personalized approach and they're not wedded to studying the same things as all their classmates, then there's no reason they can't do more project-based learning, do long-form capstones or independent studies. You'll hear me use the word "we" a lot in these discussions because we’ve got this amazing network of schools: private schools, public schools, districts—there’s rural, urban, big, small.

It’s an amazing, really heterogeneous group, and that's a good thing. A lot of them have kids doing project and problem-based learning, either individually or in teams. They’re having kids solve real-world problems, not like cookbook science you would do in lab where it’s, "Oh, we’re going to measure how long it takes to drop something." Well, surprise! Gravity's constant; we kind of know how long it’s going to take to fall.

We’re going to have them solve messy problems. There’s a reason many of our schools embrace things like design thinking and entrepreneurship. It’s not just because they’re hip; it’s because they’re cyclical. They sort of assume a certain amount of iteration: try, test, iterate, repeat, adjust—those sorts of things we think are powerful because they create that space to fail in a constructive environment.

It’s okay not to be right; your first attempt is not always going to be your best one. So those are the combination of things that are essential to mastery learning and things that sort of become possible, and frankly, more interesting for students.

You know, we talk a lot about the mission of mastery transcript schools—really all schools, I think—is to prepare young adults for what they want to do next. Whether it’s college, whether it’s career, whether it’s kind of something in between, what I think is really interesting is that for many kids in traditional schools, the hardest word in that sentence is "want." What do you want to do next?

We don’t ask kids what they want to do very often in traditional schools; we tell them what to do. As a result, they internalize this message that to be a student, like to be a learner, is to kind of show up and do what you’re told. Then we launch them into the world, hoping we want them to be successful, and it turns out that's not the way the world works. You have to figure out what you’re going to do specifically.

Kristin Disarro: Yeah, that feels like one of those 21st-century skills is actually learning how to learn and being an owner of your own learning, knowing how to set goals for yourself, and monitoring if you’re on track and doing all of those kinds of things to understand how to learn.

Mike Flanagan: I think we started like phase one of MTC was very much focused on showing that kids could get into college without these traditional metrics. One of the reasons we’ve been really successful, even with a small number of schools that have fully adopted our transcript, is we've gotten kids into 250 colleges and universities, some of the most selective, and also open enrollment two-year technical programs—everything in between.

But I'm always really quick to tell people it’s not actually because of the transcript. The transcript does not give you an advantage in getting into MIT or Caltech. But going to a mastery learning-based school—like one in which you're encouraged throughout four years to do deep work, to think about it, reflect on that work with an adult in your life, maybe write something about it, maybe present it to a group, and then make a decision about what you want to do next with that—whether it’s iterate, revise, or go in a different direction, try something new.

If you do that cycle purposefully and with feedback and coaching, by the time you get out the other end, your metacognitive skills—what you just said, Kristin, like learning how to learn—are absolutely superpowered. When you talk to our kids, the kids that go to these schools, they just make amazing applicants, whether they’re applying for an internship or a job or applying to college because they’ve got real, authentic answers to some essential questions. Like, "What do you want to do if we give you a slot at this campus where you can do any sorts of things, major in all kinds of different subjects, and study with some of the world's best experts?" What are you going to do here? What will you do to take advantage of it?

If we give you an internship at our company, what can you contribute? What are some things that are interesting? Why do you want to work here instead of somewhere else? They have those answers because it’s not the first time they’ve been asked those deep questions about what they’re doing and why. That, for us, is that metacognitive move—learning how to learn that you described.

Kristin Disarro: Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s paint a picture then. If you don’t have a test and a grade, what does it look like to be able to demonstrate that you have these skills?

Mike Flanagan: I mean, I think, you know, our schools still have tests. I don’t want to paint a utopian picture where our kids never look at anything that looks like an exam. You still need academic content, and there’s a place for that. But I do think that what you’ll see is much less focus on high-stakes assessments and much more judicious use of that.

There’s much more focus on feedback. What we want to do is have students really engaged in real work and have them give feedback to one another, teaching them how to give feedback in a constructive way. That’s a pretty important life skill. I think we’ve all unfortunately had experiences where we’ve worked with people who maybe didn’t have that skill, didn’t know how to give constructive feedback, and that’s not a recipe for awesome performance.

So, helping kids get real feedback both from one another and from adults and creating clear structures for what they are being assessed against is crucial. One of the things that every single one of our schools— in fact, I would say you really can’t use the mastery transcript or any competency-based transcript unless you, as a school, as a learning organization, have a really, really good portrait of a graduate.

Portrait of a graduate for us is the term of art for a really well-designed set of competencies. Ideally, they’ve been created in a backwards design process. You ask yourself the essential question: What do we want our kids to be able to do by the time they leave our campus? What do we want them to be able to do by the time they cross the stage and grab that diploma?

For us, that portrait of a graduate is really the cornerstone because every single one of those competencies should have clear descriptions with a lot of Bloom's taxonomy language about what those demonstrated behaviors look like. One of the real challenges of traditional grading is that sometimes students don’t actually know what they’re being graded on.

One of the advantages of standards-based grading is that those things have to be super explicit. Everyone should know on day one what good looks like, and when you see it spelled out that way, you realize how often that isn’t true. Sometimes in traditional grading environments, the line between classroom management and measuring what kids can actually do and what they’re actually learning gets blurred, and it’s important to stay really squarely on one side or the other.

Lastly, I think standards-based grading is great, but it is the beginning of a school evolution process. True mastery learning, if you think of it as a Venn diagram, is a smaller circle, and mastery-based assessment is a larger circle around it.

Kristin Disarro: Got it. That makes sense. So, lots of questions! But we do have a question coming in asking about for the average teacher who’s maybe in a traditional school but wants to begin doing some of this. How can they bring some of these ideas into their current practice when maybe the system isn’t quite set up for doing it yet?

Mike Flanagan: I really appreciate whoever asked that question because it’s really important to take a step back. If you say, “Well, why do we even have or why do we even need a Mastery Transcript Consortium?” It’s that system change is really hard. We have to change both our policies in our 50 states and change the technologies that our teachers, administrators, and learners have access to.

One of the main reasons we’re a non-profit and trying to drive system change over time is that we know this is a long road. There’s a lot of work to do, and we’re really glad to have many allies in the space. We’re part of a much larger and vibrant ecosystem of non-profits all working on competency-based education and personalized learning and mastery-based assessment— pulling schools, we think, in a good direction.

That said, if you are a teacher and you’re out on an island, like theoretically the only person at your school who is interested in rethinking grading and assessment, there are things you can do. Contract-based grading is a model that is most mastery-like, given the confines of a traditional classroom and schedule.

If you don’t have autonomy over how long your class is going to run or even what your kids are studying, what you can do is be really clear with students on day one about what the standards are for them to achieve, say, a B or an A. Work with them throughout the year to help them understand where they are in getting it and then giving them space—this is a real key principle of stance-based grading and grading for equity—giving them space to retake and retry high-stakes assessments, whether they’re big projects or tests.

There’s an amazing array of literature on that, and MTC does not own that space. If you go to, even just on social media, there are incredible networks of teachers self-organizing around teachers going gradeless, the ungrading movement. There is a real groundswell of educators who realize they’ve gotten themselves into a situation where the thing that should measure learning—assessment and grading—has kind of looped back to pull against learning.

I don’t think anybody ever designed or wanted that to be the case. I think we should all agree that our assessments should help kids learn, not push against them. I think there’s growing recognition around that and a lot of resources available.

Kristin Disarro: Yeah, excellent! Thank you. I know I'm also on the board of the Con Lab School, who's been one of the original users of this. When I first saw the transcript itself, I was like, "Oh, this is amazing." Can you share with us a little bit about just what a transcript looks like in your consortium?

Mike Flanagan: Yeah, we are very lucky to have a very simple URL: mastery.org. If you want to learn more about what that transcript looks like, you can see a version of it. At its core, a mastery transcript is a visualization of a school’s competency model.

We spent a lot of time before we built or sketched the first transcript system talking to higher education. Our team was really fortunate; we were able to sign confidentiality agreements and actually sit in admissions offices to listen as the readers were looking at actual student folders. What you realize is that even though the colleges vary quite a lot, there’s a workflow of what they’re looking for. The first question they always have is, "What is this school like? What is this program like? I want to understand the context of where this applicant has done their high school work."

Traditionally, they might look at a school profile, then look back at the transcript, and try to cross-reference. So for us, the front page of the mastery transcript is a visualization of that school’s competencies. By looking at it, you can instantly tell if we’ve done our job right what that shape of the school is. You can see where they spend the most time.

We’re big believers that students in mastery-based schools should develop what we call a jagged profile. If you give kids time and space to go deep in things they really care about, they’ll go in different directions. That’s a good thing; it’s a feature, not a bug, and so schools can have jagged profiles as well. We want those to pop off the page.

The second thing you’ll see is the jagged profile—competencies for the student in particular. If every student who got the diploma earned these competencies, individual students will go in different directions. We have a separate section to visualize that, which we call advanced competencies or advanced mastery credits.

In that space, we can start helping colleges do what they say they want to do, which is match their applicants based on fit to the programs they’re applying to and the campuses that they’re applying to. If you have students who are applying to a nursing program, you’re going to look for some STEM background, but ideally, I would think you want to look for some kind of service orientation.

So, that student has started doing some things that show they really care about other people. They want to spend their time caring for siblings, volunteering, whatever it is. Making choices in their life that show they have an orientation towards helping people—that’s a pretty big predictor of whether he or she is going to be successful in a nursing environment.

You can imagine other examples like that. What that fit between where the student has chosen to go deep, and what they say they care about, and what they want to go deeply into in college—when you see that alignment, it helps you identify that it clicks really quickly in ways that traditional transcripts don’t.

One of the strange things about a traditional schooling model is that as students get more successful in school, their transcripts actually start to look really similar. They’re all taking the same AP classes or honors classes, and they’re all getting kind of 4.0 grades. The thing that is supposed to capture four years of high school doesn’t tell you much about what makes them unique or different. That’s one of the problems we tried to lean into pretty hard.

Kristin Disarro: That totally makes sense. So, what's been the reaction from the colleges and universities that have gotten these transcripts?

Mike Flanagan: Our reach has been limited, but our uptake has been really good, and here’s what I mean. There were a million distinct applications that got processed through the common application last season, right? So, we have a lot of work in front of us if we want one.

If you were to pick a random folder reader, if you will, an admissions officer at a campus, and ask, "Hey, have you seen a mastery transcript?" Statistically, almost certainly they’re going to be like, "Nope, I have no idea what you’re talking about."

But for the schools that got a mastery transcript, we’ve got a good track record of getting in front of those proactively and talking to college readers about their experience. It’s pretty obvious, right? If I call you in the abstract and say, "Would you like to do a focus group about this strange alternative transcript?" you’re probably going to say, "No, I don’t think so."

But if I call you and say, "By the way, this is arriving in two weeks," or more importantly, "Would you like to give us feedback when you’re done?"—that’s been sort of good uptake. I think it also helps that when we started this work, many college readers thought the concept of competency-based or mastery-based education seemed a little abstract. They were like, "I don’t know what you’re talking about."

Frankly, they’re working in institutions that have decades of institutional research data and systems that use GPA and standardized tests to pretty good effect—at least to do what they want them to do. Nobody was asking us for change; nobody came to us and said, "Hey, MTC, can you please give us an alternative way of doing our work?"

However, what’s happened in the past couple of years, right? We’ve had a global pandemic. Many institutions completely moved away from standardized testing due to the pandemic. We’ve had a lot of kids who applied to college two years ago with pass/fail transcripts from otherwise traditional high schools.

We’ve got a lot of kids who may not have had access to the remote school or hybrid school offerings that their district schools were offering. You've got a lot of folks who previously were pretty content with the status quo who now are kind of snapped to attention.

Standardized testing is changing; the concept of credit based on seat time is changing. If many higher ed leaders believe that equity is critical to college admissions, understanding that access to education has been inequitable during a pandemic—all these things we think kind of line up in favor of us as a sector.

I mean that in the K-12 sector moving toward more mastery-based, competency-based approaches in a way that, obviously, the last two years have been horrible. At a national level, for a pandemic, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. But it has changed and accelerated the way really key stakeholders are now thinking about a lot of the stuff we’re talking about.

Kristin Disarro: So, let’s go to a couple of questions from Facebook. Rebecca says, “Where can you find high schools that are using a mastery curriculum? Does mastery.org have a list of those? Where can folks look?”

Mike Flanagan: We definitely have a list! Every school that’s part of the MTC membership is listed publicly on our website. I really want to be clear about this: We are not the only network of amazing mastery-based schools that aren’t part of our network. Those schools are awesome too.

So, I’ll give a shout-out to the Big Picture Learning network, which is a network of amazing schools that are really innovating and pushing hard on rethinking what schooling looks like and how we serve kids. There’s also an organization called the Aurora Institute that publishes a map and updates it quarterly, I think, several times a year, showing the state of competency-based education in each of the 50 states.

It shows you that there are states going all in, essentially saying, “We’re going to personalize competency-based across the entire state.” It’s really interesting because, in a world where so much of our educational practices and discourse have gotten really politicized, there is no correlation between the politics of state adoption of competency-based education or mastery-based education. It makes for strange bedfellows in a good way.

There are some folks saying: “Hey, this is a key driver for equity. It’s about serving communities of kids who have been traditionally underserved by our systems. We need to do better by those kids.” And there’s also a model that says we’re really focused on business; we want to be a place where kids can graduate and get amazing technology-based manufacturing jobs. We want to give them the skills for that.

What’s really interesting is that you wind up in the same place; they all wind up talking together about mastery-based learning, which I think is pretty great.

Kristin Disarro: That’s great! It leads actually to Brian from Facebook’s question. What are the challenges involved in partnering with public schools?

Mike Flanagan: Well, it depends on the public schools. The challenge and the greatest strength and liability of our national education system is that we have a massively decentralized system. Sometimes that’s awesome; it gives districts—even individual schools in districts—a lot of autonomy to experiment.

I think we exist largely as a consortium because there are these lighthouse districts led by really inspiring leaders saying, “We’re going to do things differently. We’re not going to wait for permission from our state,” and they need a network, so they come and join us, which is great.

But then there are also states where the policies are just not favorable. If you are trying to transform your district and embrace credit based on proficiency rather than on seat time, it’s not going to help if the law says kids have to take a specific number of hours of social studies in order to graduate. You need someone to give you permission to do that.

So those are probably the biggest challenges. They’re not challenges specific to public schools as a whole; it’s differing rates of adoption of favorable policy frameworks in different states and localities. Sometimes that works in your favor. Sometimes there are states—Utah, South Carolina, there’s a lot of interest in Kentucky right now—where they’ll create favorable policy frameworks and provide funding, and then it can be off to the races.

Kristin Disarro: Fantastic. We are already 30 minutes in, and we’re at the con; quickly, it sounds like the work you're doing really unblocks one of the big concerns or objections that folks have, which is, "Oh, if we do this, how are we going to be able to get students into college?" Those issues, which sounds like one of those pieces—I'm going to end on one more question that came from YouTube. Nasser Grunono says, “What are all those medals for?”

Mike Flanagan: So, they are—thank you, Nasser! None of them is a victory medal, and I think that’s really important and hopefully on brand for what I’m talking about. We're an anti-sorting organization. They’re finishers’ medals for different races of different lengths and different types. I keep them up there because I think they’re a good metaphor or analogy for grading based on mastery.

If you finish, even if it takes you a little bit longer, you still get that. If you get a wide enough array of them for different lengths and different events, it starts to tell a story of what you can do. We keep them up there as a reminder of what we’re trying to do: give kids evidence that even if it takes them a bit longer to get to proficiency or mastery in certain areas, as long as they get there, it’s good.

Kristin Disarro: Fantastic! Thanks so much for the work you’re doing, and I look forward to seeing more from the Mastery Transcript Consortium! Thanks for being with us today.

Mike Flanagan: Thank you so much! It's been a delight.

Kristin Disarro: Excellent! To all of you, we actually have another Ed Talk tomorrow with Nicholas Ferroni, who we’re going to talk to specifically about what it would look like if we really appreciated teachers. So, stay tuned for that, and we’ll see you tomorrow!