Khan Academy Best Practices for Supporting Students in Special Education

Hi everyone, this is Jeremy Shieffling from Khan Academy. Hope you're having a good hump day! I know we're kind of in a hump season right now, trying to get over this big thing as a society. So I appreciate you making time out of everything going on in your lives, both professionally and personally, to be with us.

Speaking of that, I have to give a huge shout out to Chris Cosberg here because Chris is not only a dedicated special education teacher in Arizona, he's also the father of three kids, five and under. So when we talk about work-life balance, Chris is juggling as many balls in the air as you can imagine, and so we really appreciate you taking time out of all that chaos to share your expertise with us today.

Chris: Absolutely happy to be here! So just to give folks a sense of where you're coming from, tell us a little bit about what you do as an educator in normal times and then how you're coping today, given these very abnormal times we live in.

Chris: On a day-to-day basis, outside of a pandemic, I do special education math specifically. I have an ELA counterpart, and this year I'm doing seventh and eighth grade. Last year I did fourth or eighth grade, and so I do a little bit of pull out, but most of my stuff is pushing, helping support the students and the teachers.

Jeremy: Cool! And how are things starting to shift for you as we've gone to this remote learning environment all of a sudden, especially given special education students?

Chris: Special education students for me, it hasn't changed a lot. I'm meeting more one-on-one rather than in groups of three or four. I'm just having kids schedule their time. But before the pandemic started, I was using Khan Academy to track and do goal progress stuff with the students and allow them to track their own progress and be aware of what they need to be working on. So that part of it hasn't changed a lot for me, from pre-pandemic to currently.

Jeremy: Cool! I love that you're still that lifeline for students, even on a one-on-one basis because I know that's hard to scale, but so important for students.

Chris: Yeah, I haven't been pushing it a ton because they have so much other stuff going on. So it's been a few emails just checking in. I've done a few video conferencing experiences with them, which have been interesting. But yeah, you know, just letting them know that I'm here if they need to talk, if they need to see my face if that's helpful, and then just reminders that they can still access, and I still need them to access that stuff that they've been doing on Khan before their pandemic.

Jeremy: Cool! And talk to us a little bit about sort of what your expectations are with Khan Academy, especially in this moment, so that folks who are trying to replicate that for maybe the first time can get a sense of how to approach it.

Chris: So Khan Academy in terms of special education, how I use it, all the kids that are on my service roster are in my class. I think the name changes every year; this year it might just be Cosberg. So they're all in my class, and then from there, I assign them specific standards based on their goals in their IEPs. I think I have a caseload of 14 this year, so I assign 14 students different assignments based on their goal. For instance, if I have an eighth grader who's working on one-step equations, their assignments will be gauged towards one-step equations.

Chris: One of the things I really like about Khan Academy is I can scaffold them up to that. So I might assign just combining like terms, and they show that they master those different components of solving equations. I give them the actual equations.

Jeremy: Cool! And just sort of illustrate what you're talking about here. Obviously, you can make assignments from your Khan Academy classroom or you can search for the exact thing that you want to hand out, search for exercises in that area, and then assign it not just to your whole class but to individual students. So you get that sort of differentiation that you are alluding to there.

Chris: One of the most helpful things for me is when I've written that IEP, and it's enforced, I'll go on Khan and assign the standardized assignments that they need. Then I'll change the due dates based on when I want them due, so it progresses them toward that year-end goal. So then I have it set up right away. When the pandemic started, all my kids were already set up with a full year of instruction because I did it at the very beginning.

Jeremy: Very cool! And so even for folks who are just getting started in this moment, you can absolutely catch up with Chris in the sense of getting your students onto Khan Academy by handing out that course link or using Google Classroom if you have it. Then you can start to give these differential assignments. I know a lot of teachers are really curious what you do next. Like, what are your expectations for how fast an assignment should be done? Do you grade it? Do you give feedback?

Chris: So it depends on every student, right? Not every kid is going to go through their assignments at the same pace. I come at it from the perspective that I have an assignment that I want them to be able to master by the end of the year, and so my due dates are pretty flexible because what I'm looking for most is that skill mastery. Even if it's taking a long time, that's still giving me data. So what I talk with my students about is one of the best things about Khan is the "try again" where they can do it, and I can see their score, and they can see their score, and we can go over that assignment, and then they can try it again to let them know that just because they did it and got a certain score, that doesn't mean they're done. They have to keep learning it, and they have to keep that understanding with them as they move forward.

Chris: I really like the "try again" option. One of my favorite things is when I go on and I see the kid has tried 14 times, and then I go up to him: "This is awesome that you keep trying!" Because at my school in particular, we really preach that growth mindset, and it's hard to have that growth mindset on worksheets. It's just a lot of work to do worksheets over and over again in my mind. I find the students a lot more willing to try those five questions or those seven questions again because it's easier than the worksheets in my opinion.

Jeremy: Cool! I love that, and I think probably now more than ever, growth mindset is so essential for every student all across the country, all around the world, who's now basically being asked to keep pushing in the face of adversity. Khan Academy actually has a bunch of activities and exercises you can share with your students even right away. That being said, when you share out these assignments with students, how do you keep them motivated? I know this sort of speaks to the growth mindset piece, but a lot of teachers have been asking, "Okay, motivation is even hard in my physical classroom now with distance between us. How do I keep people engaged even in the face of everything that we're never up against?"

Chris: One of the things that I've found motivating for the students is that when I tell them they have to reach a certain score, and then they can be done and they just can move on to the next thing. To me, the students being able to progress at their own pace is motivation. They can be done as quickly as they want to be done depending on how much effort they're putting in and how focused and all that. So I think just the self-paced nature of Khan Academy is more motivational for the kids.

Jeremy: Cool! And so to that point, will you assign multiple assignments at a time so that students can work ahead if they want to, as well as focus on just one if they need that mastery?

Chris: Yeah, so I usually have, like I said, for the students with the math goals, I have them set with periodic dates. It's like these ones need to be done by this time, these need to be done by this time, but as soon as they're done, they can move on. I'll have kids that finish all that stuff and have showed mastery of their IEP goal before the year is up, which is just a huge point of celebration for them.

Jeremy: Cool! So definitely different ways to slice and dice it and also give students that runway so they can really start to take autonomous ownership over their learning. Okay, so at this point, I actually want to switch gears a little bit and take it over to questions directly from the audience, and thank you to everyone who's been sharing those already. If you haven't seen it yet, you can ask questions directly to Chris and get them answered live by going to the questions feature of the GoToWebinar control panel. Right now, I'm seeing questions from Kathy and Carrie and Jean, and we're going to just take those as they come in. So submit questions, whatever's on your mind, Chris is brave enough to take them on left, right, and center.

Jeremy: Okay, so I think Kathy's first question is being answered a little bit here. She says, "I'm a grade one teacher, but I have students in my class who are the kindergarten level or grade two level for certain skills. How do I make sure that every student is getting what they need even with those different levels?" I think that's kind of what you were talking about with one-by-one assignments.

Chris: Yeah, so you can assign if you have your students grouped by ability level or however you have them grouped. You can assign specific students. So as you're seeing on the screen, you can pick what students are given what assignments. So you can have a third of your class on the kindergarten level standard that you're working on in your first-grade class; you can have 30-year kids on that first-grade standard that you're working on, and you can have a third of your kids working on that second-grade level standard. Khan Academy is beautiful in the way that you can differentiate and scaffold for all of your students.

Jeremy: Cool! All right, so I think that speaks to that. Thanks for the great question, Kathy! You're getting a little love here, Chris, from Andrea and Anastasia. Your fan club is growing, so we wanted to thank you for sharing this awesome advice today. Let's see here—ooh, Kathy's asking another good question! Is there a way to help students who are not confident, especially about their reading skills, given so much of Khan is reading-based? You know, questions are sort of offered in this text-based format. Have you ever had to deal with that with your students, Chris?

Chris: I have a couple of students that struggle with reading, and on Google Chrome, there's just the setting where it can read the text to them. So they've been using the computer settings to have that read to them. If you're talking about right now and you maybe wouldn't be able to walk them through how to turn on that audio, it could be something. I've had a student already during this pandemic log on, and she was struggling with slope and she shared her screen with me, and I was able to talk her through it while seeing what she was doing. That would be an option. Maybe she's working with first grade, so that might be difficult—I don't know, that's younger than I usually work with. I know my kindergartner, she's been doing Khan Academy Kids, and just in this pandemic, she has started doing Khan Academy as her reading has gotten better, but she did Khan Academy Kids when she was struggling to read what Khan Academy was talking about. She really loved that. My two-year-old loves Khan Academy Kids, and that's more geared towards kids that maybe struggle with reading because it's not as literary.

Chris: Yeah, I'll second that! Like my own six-year-old who says, "Oh, Khan Academy Kids is for little kids!" actually loves it compared to Khan Academy, the regular version.

Chris: Just because again, it's really easy to engage. It sort of reads aloud for you and it gets the student hooked right from the beginning versus all the upfront setup, especially for early elementary students. So highly recommend checking that out if you're teaching that audience.

Chris: Yeah, and Khan Academy Kids has their social emotional health; Khan Academy Kids is like a whole child program in and of itself. I won't get into that because I could go on about it, but that might be another option you want to look into if your kids struggle with the reading part of it.

Jeremy: Cool! I love that. Okay, great questions, Kathy, and thank you Chris for handling those so well. Jean is asking a really good question, and I've heard this from a lot of teachers that maybe speaks to the equity issue or just sort of the complexity of the times we're living in. Gina has been sending out assignments to all of her students; some of them have joined her classroom and started to do them, others have not actually signed up yet. Is there some way, especially given that we're in this remote learning environment, where you can get those students over the hump and get them into your classroom? Or is there a way to reach students who aren't even signed up with Khan Academy?

Chris: That's gonna be hard to do remotely. I always have the kids sign up with their school email. Our school district has every kid has Google or Gmail, and they have Google Docs and stuff, so I always have them click "Sign in with Google," and that makes it simpler. It's like one less password and username to remember. As far as getting content out to them on Khan Academy, you can assign assignments where every student sees the same questions. That might be an option where you can go through that assignment where all the kids that are already signed in will be seeing the same questions as you, and you could record going through that and maybe email it out to the kids so they're seeing the same questions and getting the same content. That's the tough question though: how do you get these kids online when you're not sitting right there with them helping them get online? Our district is sending home paper packets for kids that don't have online access. I don't know, you could try to send a video in; that might be my suggestion with all the same questions and then emailing it now.

Jeremy: Totally! I think you nailed it there, Chris, because it is a tough thing to do even in class, let alone with this distance in between us. One little hack that I offer out there is if you're just having trouble getting folks really registered through that whole process and you just need to get them doing something soon so they don't sort of build those gaps into their foundations, you will be able to notice that for every single piece of content in Khan Academy, there is actually a separate URL. So for example, if you want to share out this video or these lessons all about growth mindset, you could literally just copy and paste that URL into an email, into Remind, into the ClassDojo, however you normally communicate with students and families, and they can access it without even registering for Khan Academy. Now, you don't get the great tracking and progress reports, but at the very least, you get less friction in the process and an easier sort of place to start.

Chris: Yeah, that's a great point! You don't have to have a login to be able to use Khan Academy, which is awesome! It's entirely free, and it's crazy. So they could just do it without a login and maybe take a picture of their score so they can at least send that to you, or just email it to you so you have some bit of information. But yeah, they don't have to have a login to access it, so that link that he was talking about is great. Everybody can access it whether they have a Khan Academy account or not.

Jeremy: Cool! Great question, Jean, and Chris, thank you for speaking to that one directly. Jill's got another tough one for you, and Jill's curious about specifically working with special education students who have trouble processing information and getting ready to engage with these videos. Can you just talk about what the Khan Academy video feature is, how you might use it, and how it might serve students in this audience?

Chris: When I use it, it depends on the ability level of the students. A lot of the students I work with, I can tell them to watch the video and take notes, and then if they don't, then it's something that's a discussion we have. One of my favorite things about the videos is they say, "Why don't you pause it and try it out?" That's a great opportunity for the students to try and see whether they're gauging it or not. The videos, to me, seem to be based on the standard; the grade-level standard—the videos are kind of at that grade level's attention span. So there is in that it seems the eighth grade ones are different than the third grade videos that I've seen. One of the things that I talk to the students about, and we work on in seventh and eighth grade, is I kind of give them a taking form that they can follow along and fill out because a lot of kids just don't know how to take notes on these videos. When they're in seventh and eighth grade, they need to know how to take notes.

Jeremy: Yeah, I don't know if I can answer your question. I don't know; that's awesome! I think I'll just add two things because all these videos are actually hosted on YouTube. You have two really good features: number one, you have closed captions. So for students who again need a little more support, you've got that channel available.

Jeremy: And you can always turn down the playback speed, so if students want to watch it at three-quarters time or half-time, they can certainly do that. I absolutely pause and rewind, as Chris was talking about, so hopefully that gives your students some tools in this sort of challenging time.

Chris: I work with a student who struggles with math but is a gifted reader. So like printing off the closed captions of the video, just having her read it while doing her math helps her understand it because we're using her strength of reading to help with the struggle of math. That's one of those things—like you said—in order to print off those transcripts.

Jeremy: Cool! That's so awesome! I think one of the things that I really want to emphasize about Khan Academy is it's really just a tool for teachers to use based on their existing knowledge of students. It's not teaching your students for you; it's just augmenting what you already know to be true.

Jeremy: So if you know that your students have certain gifts here and certain challenges there, use the tool to fill in those gaps and play to their strengths. Great question from David— I know you were talking before Chris about standards, making sure that you're aligned with that. How do you find standards on Khan Academy? How do you make sure that you're aligned?

Chris: So in Khan Academy, there's a search bar, and you can type in a standard, and the standard will pop up. Or if you see on the video that's right there, it tells you the standard that that video is for. If you click on that, it’ll open up just kind of like their standards menu, and over here on the left are all the grades listed. If I'm working with a seventh-grade student, I'll click on that seventh grade, or if I'm working with an eighth-grade student, I'll click on the eighth grade, and I'll give them a little bit of the eighth-grade standard that I want them to work on. But also, if it's an eighth-grade standard that they need to master, I'll give them seventh-grade and sixth-grade standards as well to kind of build up, and that also helps me identify what's happening.

Chris: So from here too, you can click on scale drawings, and it'll pull up the scale drawings, and this is GA1. They have seven things, and from here you can click assign, and you can assign this assignment to whatever students, however many students are needing GA1.

Jeremy: Just like Chris said, you can always—if you know those standards, if they're burned into your retinas or into your mind—you can just rattle them off, and it will just pull up exactly what you need. I've also shared that common core map in the chat for folks who want to dig in a little deeper.

Chris: Yeah, and so that's why I do it right after I write my IEPs is because that standard is in my head, and I do them all the two grade levels below and then feeding up to the standard that they need to master.

Jeremy: Cool! This is a higher-level question, sort of specific to the world we're addressing today. Kayla wants to know, how do you tackle accommodations and modifications in this world of Khan Academy?

Chris: So I work with a couple of students that have modifications, and one of them is in seventh grade. When they're solving two-step equations, I'll go to sixth grade and do the sixth-grade equivalent standards or even the fifth-grade equivalent standards. That's just the biggest thing. In general, with accommodations and modifications, the relationship you have with the general education teacher, if that student is in their grade book—like I have a great relationship with this student's teacher. I have a great book for him, and when they're working on seventh-grade equations, I'm supplementing modified assignments that are at a lower grade level, but it's still working on the same standards, if that makes sense.

Jeremy: Very cool! Yeah, it goes back to that sort of core thing you laid out at the beginning, which is you can pick and choose what's right for your students based on what you know about them versus having to have one sort of one-size-fits-all approach.

Chris: Yes, and even if this is the conversation I have with Jenna and students or teachers all the time—is that you can accommodate for any student that is in your class. That's the beauty of Khan Academy is that if you really understand the standards and you know what the kids actually have to know, you can adjust from there.

Chris: Khan Academy is great for accommodations and modifications because you can assign different standards or you can assign lower grade-level standards. One of the ways we have accommodated in seventh grade is if you go to the—theso we use illustrative math, and Khan Academy partners with illustrative math. So under Courses, Illustrative Math, seventh grade, they have lessons for illustrative public school drawings.

Chris: You see that there are lessons 1, 2, 3, 5, all those lessons there. As we accommodate, Jenna the teacher and I go through and see which ones are the foundational lessons. We'll say, "Student X, these lessons 1, 2, 5, 11," and so we're making sure that they're getting all the same standards, but they don't have as many of the lessons that they have to do.

Jeremy: Super star! Enough we've done the accommodations for adjusting that mastery level we're asking for. In Khan Academy, each assignment has a familiar rating, a proficient, and then a mastery rating, and then the mastery rating you get if you've done the whole unit and the unit test.

Chris: We might adjust where like the proficient level is a hundred percent for that student because we're good with the 85, 80, or the 75 percent that that student is reaching. Just adjusting that grade scaling too is another way we accommodate.

Jeremy: And then speaking of that relationship with the gen ed teacher, Ashley's asking a really important question, which is do your students belong to multiple Khan Academy classes? Do you share one Khan Academy account with the gen ed teacher? How do you sort of do that delicate dance?

Chris: So the eighth-grade teacher that I was working with, we started using Khan Academy more this year, and so I was more familiar with how I created the class on Khan Academy. All the students were in there, and I was using that to teach her how to use it and assign stuff. The students were in her class and then I also had some students who were in academic academy with me, or the students that are on my service roster are going to see multiple classes on that left side.

Chris: It might be gen ed teachers' classroom, my elective classroom, and then it'll say, like, "Mr. Cosberg's students" or something like that. The students can be in multiple classrooms.

Chris: You might be able to speak to this a little bit more, but I haven't found a way to have multiple teachers on one classroom.

Jeremy: Yeah, no, it's a tough point. It's something we're looking at right now, but if there's a co-teacher environment, you know, a special education teacher and a gen ed teacher, sometimes they do share accounts. You know, that's not ideal, but that's sort of where we are right now.

Jeremy: I will just sort of show you what the learner dashboard looks like. So just to give you a sense of how one student can have multiple teachers on Khan Academy, down here at the very bottom under this teacher section, you can always join any class. So if Chris has his own class code and then the gen ed teacher in eighth grade has their own class code, that single student can easily inhabit both classrooms without having to create a separate account or have a separate email address.

Jeremy: So that's probably the easiest way to get folks started, and if you're ever curious about what the learner view looks like, just go to your name in the upper right-hand corner and then learner home, and you can see exactly what students see.

Chris: Yeah, so they'll see all their classes, and our seventh-grade ELA teacher actually started using Khan Academy this year too, so the kids were doing seventh-grade math and seventh-grade ELA. So they would see both of their classes.

Chris: Even if they're in the gen ed math teacher's class and they're one of my students, in the activity view, if you go to students and you go to activity, you can see what they're working on, whether it's for your class or someone else's class. That's another way to stay up to date on whether they're doing what they need to be doing for gen ed math class.

Jeremy: So you see assignments here. They might see the stuff that I've assigned them under my class, and then if you click to activity log, you can see the videos they're watching, you can see the exercises they're doing, and you can see the scores, you can see how long they've been taking on them. You can adjust the range, and so even if they're not in your class, they can add you as their teacher, and you can still see what they're doing.

Chris: That's right! Yeah, that way you have that total visibility into a student's full experience, not just your little slice of the pie.

Jeremy: Exactly! Cool! Well, I know we're at time, and I know you've got your own kids, both your students and your children, to take care of, Chris. So I just wanted to end with one final question, which is I know there are a lot of other questions out there across the country. If you were going to recommend one or two resources for folks to get help with Khan Academy, what's been useful for you in your own practice?

Chris: One of the most useful things is me going on and doing the work I'm asking the students to do, so I understand the experiences that they're going through. I usually try and watch the videos and do the assignments that I'm asking them to do. So when they have questions, I can kind of respond a little bit better to that, especially when we're doing things remotely, and I can't be standing next to the computer when they have their question.

Chris: I think the biggest thing is it's not going to be perfect. I started out by just trying things on Khan Academy and then kind of refined it from there. The kids doing like— as long as kids are on Khan Academy, it's not going to hurt them, I think would be my advice. Just get them on, and then I really push it as a resource because I work with seventh and eighth graders, and so I really harp on that it's a good resource for them when they go to high school.

Chris: Because of that search tool, if they don't understand something that they're doing in high school, they can go in and search that topic, and they'll see videos and they'll see exercises. It's an incredible study tool.

Chris: The conversation I have over and over again with my students is that to study math, you're not just looking at notes. You have to do the problems over and over and over again. That's why it's another great resource.

Jeremy: I love that, especially in this moment we're all sort of living day-to-day crisis to crisis, taking that long view of, hey, our students have a big road ahead of them. How do we set them up for success even with the roadblocks we're facing in this moment? Khan can definitely be a part of that.

Jeremy: So Chris, I want to thank you so much for taking time away from your own class and your own kids to share your expertise across the country. I want to thank everyone else for joining in and investing time in this session. I wish you a lot of luck and success on this tough road ahead, and if there's anything we can do to support you, please just let us know!

Chris: Thank you so much! Thanks for having me! Bye, all!