Homeroom with Sal & Meaghan Pattani - Tuesday, July 7

Hi everyone! Welcome to the Khan Academy homeroom. For those who are wondering what this is, this is just a forum for all of us to stay together, especially since it was started when schools closed. Obviously, summer has arrived, and I announced that schools are continuing to be closed. We can talk about what might happen in back-to-school, but we can also talk about anything, obviously education topics but anything that's on your mind.

I’m really excited about our guests that we have today. We have a very exciting announcement from Khan Academy! Before I get into that, I will give my standard announcement to remind everyone that we are not-for-profit. We only exist because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. A special shout out to several groups that have stepped up right when they saw that we were already running at a deficit before COVID, and that deficit grew because we had increased traffic and we were trying to accelerate programs.

So, special thanks to Bank of America, google.org, the Gates Foundation, AT&T, and many other foundations and corporations that have supported Khan Academy pre-COVID and especially during this COVID crisis. But we continue to run into a deficit, so any support donation at any level is very, very much appreciated if you're in the position to do so.

So with that, I'm very excited to introduce my colleague Megan Patottie, who works with partners and teachers, educators around the country. Megan, we have a very exciting announcement. What is it?

Megan: "We do, Sal! We have an exciting announcement. We have just launched our first course for teachers in the United States called 'Khan for Educators' to help teachers understand all the things that are available on Khan Academy for teachers. I think sometimes there's an understanding that Khan Academy has all these great things for students, but we also have a lot of really great things for teachers. So, we wanted to bring that to the forefront."

Sal: "It’s free, just like the rest of Khan Academy, and available for educators everywhere. We've always had many tools for teachers: teacher dashboards and reports and ways to make assignments. This course will help teachers understand all of these different dimensions they can leverage in their schools or with their students."

Megan: "You got it, Sal! It's to teach teachers what it's like to be a student on Khan Academy. The course is set up the same way our courses are for students, so teachers can learn what it feels like to really be a student on Khan Academy. They learn about mastery learning and all the amazing tools and content that's available for teachers to use with their students, along with some best practices we’ve gathered from teachers all over the country who are willing to share their expertise and innovative ways of using Khan Academy in the classroom."

Sal: "And your point, this course has what we call our master mechanics. Tell us more about that."

Megan: "So, there’s a way for teachers to actually not just watch videos and look at articles, but they can get practice and feedback on whether they've grasped things or digested them."

Sal: "Yes, the same way we encourage students to practice and demonstrate what they've learned. We're encouraging teachers to do the same. This course is founded in our mastery system. So along with videos and articles, there are exercises and unit tests for teachers to demonstrate their understanding. If teachers earn mastery in this course, we will provide a certificate of recognition. Right now, we’re also running a campaign for any teacher who masters the course and completes it. It’s recognized as their six-month ticket; they're entered into a chance to win a one-on-one with you!”

Megan: “And we can see some of the screen shots! These are screenshots of both our teacher resources, and we see Meghan is definitely one of the notable people in the course itself on how to be able to go through these teacher readiness."

Sal: "For those who want to use it, it looks like they can go to Khan.co/flash (all in caps) k4e. Down there at the bottom left if you can see it. I’ll have to repeat it but I’ll say it actually k4e us for educators. 'Us' is what that stands for."

Megan: "And already we're getting some nice comments and questions from YouTube. Suzanna Garcia Dominguez, who's one of our regulars—she’s almost kind of part of our team now—she’s always had interesting questions and comments. She wrote, 'helps teachers understand and organize. Great to have it all in one place. Best resource money can't buy.'”

Sal: "There you go! We'd like to believe that we are invaluable, but it's glad to hear that. There’s one question that I know the answer to, and you know the answer to, but it's good to answer it as well. The question is from Facebook: 'Davita Hayes Hatchett, will this eliminate the ambassador program?' I hope not! I enjoy interactions with my colleagues in this role."

Megan: "Of course not! We are really grateful for our ambassadors. For those who might be unfamiliar, the Khan Academy ambassador program invites teachers who are using Khan Academy in innovative ways in their classrooms to join with others who are doing similar things, share best practices, and provide training to their teammates while connecting directly with the Khan Academy team to share what they're doing so we can learn more about how we can improve the product and support other teachers."

Sal: "Absolutely not! The Khan Academy ambassadors are a huge asset to our organization and definitely a huge asset to me. I couldn't have built this course without really great input from a whole bunch of ambassadors. You know, we often say, I often say very clearly, if I had to pick between an amazing teacher and amazing technology for my own kids or anyone else's kids, I would pick an amazing teacher every time."

Megan: "Luckily, you don't have to make that trade-off! Ideally, you can create amazing technology in service of amazing teachers. That also applies when we talk about how do we teach teachers or how do we help support teachers. Human beings are always going to be the gold standard."

Sal: "So, our ambassador program and our ambassador teachers are really the rock stars out there who live it every day. They know what it's like to be a teacher, and they are super users of Khan Academy. So nothing can compare to our ambassadors in terms of being able to support other teachers and how they can better empower their students."

Megan: "Yes! It was a good question. You know, I was surprised; she's like, who's even thinking about that? I would never tell! But just engaged that that's out there. No, this is you know, the ambassador program is something not only are we excited about; we've been growing about it. If we could expand it, we would support it better."

Sal: "Let's see, there are a couple of fun questions here. Let’s see, we haven't never gotten this question before! From YouTube, Explorer Questioner Stalin asks, 'Megan, what are some of your go-to brain fuel snacks?' Right now I'm having watermelon and broccoli sprouts. Megan, I'll let you go because my recommendations are going to be more fringe.”

Megan: "Okay, so two different things. I'd say during when I'm in the office, it's string cheese and carrot sticks, which sounds fairly healthy. At home, it's definitely s'mores-flavored Luna bars—much more chocolate! I think that pandemic has made my eating habits probably a little bit worse."

Sal: "You started strong with the cheese and carrots; it's very healthy! You know, I have nothing against the Luna corporation, but have you ever had the sugar and caloric content? Not to make you paranoid about those things, but you know—"

Megan: "Anyway, but the answer to the same question?"

Sal: "Yeah, I mean there’s definitely that! There's the go-to snacks my animal brain wants me to have, which is essentially just like me shoveling sugar into my mouth! But the ones that I try... I've actually this is my latest indulgence and this shows that I have weakness for sugar and I you know, they're not sponsors of Khan Academy in any way shape or form, but I don’t from Costco I've been getting these keto ice cream bars that taste awesome! Most ketogenic low-carb stuff does not taste good, especially when they try to make desserts. But this stuff is awesome! So anyway, I highly recommend those."

Megan: "That's been my new thing. My wife just planted—it's actually right outside the window—like you know where you can't see some planters with some leafy greens, and there’s something fun about just like going and eating them straight from the plant like a goat or something. It's just like yes, fresh! I'm getting nutrients! Those are my big ones. And I'm sorry for judging your Luna bar; I used to eat a lot of those."

Sal: "I looked at them; I’m sure I'm gonna get letters from Luna. The thing is people use the word energy bars, and you know, like trail mix and stuff like that because when you're going hiking, you do need a lot of calories and you're burning it and all that. But then that somehow got conflated—I think intentionally by the marketing machine—that energy bar is equal to healthy, and obviously if you're sitting around, you know, watching cartoons, which I do a lot of."

Megan: "Exactly! Alright, so this may be slightly more serious, although what we put in our bodies is a very important question. YouTube's Kirtana Nagala asks, 'Hello! What should we do to prepare for an online test and reduce test nervousness?' Love your point of view! I'm happy to give mine as well!"

Megan: "Well, what I used to tell my students—what I think is helpful—is preparation. If you can prepare, you know, practice questions in a similar environment setup, practice time sessions, giving yourself the opportunity to feel like you're in a real test taking environment and that you have a grasp on similar concepts—it takes away a lot of it, I would often think of my students as being the intimidating pieces. You can practice the parts you can control, and there are pieces you can never control. But being able to practice and get yourself comfortable with the pieces you can takes away some of that intimidation."

Sal: "What do you think?"

Megan: "No, I agree with all of that! Obviously, you can't understate the value of preparation, especially kind of preparation that maps matches the context. And that you know, it goes into something that's taken me a long time to learn, and I still remind myself all the time is that you know—In life, you can get focused on the outcome or you can focus on the process. Naturally, our inner animals or egos, whatever, tend to get focused on the outcome. I need to get an A on this or think about how awesome that would be or think about how horrible it would be if I fail this. It's not just on tests; we do that with our careers, we do that with pretty much everything!"

Sal: "Where we naturally gravitate to the outcome and kind of getting attached to an outcome, we're having a fear of a negative outcome. That's almost always counterproductive. It’s much more valuable to get focused on the process and then to say, 'Yeah, I'm going to do my best!' And this is kind of what you were saying: focus on the process, get your practice in, and then the outcome is what it is. Ironically, the more you get fixated on the outcome, oftentimes the outcome won't be as good! So that's, I think, the first thing."

Megan: "That’s true. And you know, I'm preaching it—I don't practice it in everything in my life—but when I do whenever I'm getting stressed about something, I'm getting anxious about something, I'm like, look, it’s just the process! I'll focus on what's in my locus of control, do it the best I can, and then the world will turn out the way it does! No point in stressing about it."

Sal: "And then, you know, if I were to continue to preach, I would tell people, don't underestimate meditation. Even if you do 5-10 minutes a day, just quietly try to steal your mind, have fun with it, be curious, laugh about yourself when you get distracted. You’re going to find that you know it’s a lot harder to take a lot of things as seriously as sometimes we do—in a good way, in a good way!"

Megan: "So going back to some of the teacher training from Facebook: Robin Schwartz asks, would you recommend having this be a part of new pre-service teachers training?"

Sal: "I would strongly recommend that! To be honest, one of the key reasons we built 'Khan for Educators' is because we heard and asked from a lot of teachers saying, 'I want to be ready when my students come in the door to my classroom. I want to know as much as I can before I get started.' So we've been working on some teacher training and support in person, but how could we reach more teachers to support more students around the country? I would encourage pre-service teachers to engage with the course and feel free to reach out to us with feedback and things that would be helpful for future iterations."

Megan: "And from Facebook, Sarah Louise asks, 'Can you give some examples of best practices?' I guess, you know, like what are some of the things you see, Megan? You visit a lot of classrooms of a lot of teachers, and obviously, you've helped teach this 'Khan for Educators' course. What were some of the key headlines, the CliffsNotes that you think are important?”

Megan: "Sure! I'd say one thing that is a misconception sometimes is that if you have all these tools, you should choose one and that’s it. What’s really amazing about Khan Academy is that you can use the course mastery system to set long-term goals for students to work on the mastery of skills, but also combine our assignment tool to narrow in on things that are either curricular aligned or adding in from another course or you know, supporting individual students on skills or individual gaps that might be there."

Sal: "Using both course mastery and assigning a long-term goal and supporting students through assignments to hit a short-term goal so you can hit all of your students with the parts they need!"

Megan: "We've gotten some advice from teachers on how to do that for a whole class or small groups, how to do this in perhaps a remote situation, that a lot of our teachers are dealing with right now. But really being able to combine and integrate the tools on Khan Academy instead of just looking at them all in isolation!"

Sal: "I have this question—this is a question for me! I’m neutral about Khan. I want to ask Sal, 'Sir, thank you for being very formal!' I'm not used to that! What is the one thing you learned from all your homeroom sessions during this pandemic?"

Sal: "You know, I gotta say there's been so much! When I started this, I didn't expect I would personally enjoy it so much from a learning point of view. I thought it would just be a fun conversation. But obviously, you know, I think many of y'all saw the conversation with Bill Gates that was a little bit of an eye-opener. We’ve been reading or hearing a lot on the news back then about COVID and how it's all gonna play out, but I think that was a little bit of a wake-up call to how serious it was and how long-lasting this was going to be."

Megan: "That was a big thing!"

Sal: "I think Mellody Hobson, Ray Dalio, several others, you know, just talking about the economic implications and the powers of the Fed, and you know, the seeming continued disconnect that we're seeing between the stock market and what seems to be happening on the ground and you know, people’s everyday lives and why that might be happening. There have just been a ton of people from Mellody Hobson to Francis Ford Coppola who talked about their life narrative and how they got to where they go. That’s always a fun thing because a lot of these people that you read about and hear about your whole life, no one often asks them just like, 'How did you end up here? What were you like as a kid? Did you ever think you were gonna win an Academy Award one day or run a major company or whatever else?'"

Megan: "I think the conversation with Bill Lewis around race and what was happening was very eye-opening to me. I thought I understood many dimensions of it, but it just added a more personal dimension. Especially with the incident that happened in Central Park with the dog walker and the bird watcher, and how you know race was weaponized against the bird watcher. I think Bill framed it in a way that was very eye-opening to me. I didn't fully appreciate that dimension until then!"

Sal: "I think we’ve now done like 60 or 70 of these live streams. There have been a lot! The conversation with Fareed Zakaria was very wide-ranging! A lot about the countries with our internal team members, obviously with Megan now and then Marta, you know, we learned about her journey. I learned things about team members that I had no clue about—I’ve worked with them for many, many years."

Megan: "So anyway, that's the synopsis. I'm really enjoying this because I feel like I'm getting to learn alongside all of you."

Sal: "Let’s see, there’s a question from YouTube: Suzanna Garcia Dominguez always asks great questions! Not that we're judging any of your other questions; they are all great! It's like, you know, what's your favorite child—we love them all! Will there be a fall pacing guide for each grade level?"

Megan: "I can make, and you on tape stab back and I just say sound, do you want to share some of your thoughts there first, and then I’ll add on?"

Sal: "Yes, the simple answer is yes! We're working on it. At minimum, there's going to be a pacing guide that—if let's say a sixth-grade student wants to be able to say, 'Okay, what percent mastery should I be at milestone points over the course of the year,' that’s gonna be there for sure. We are figuring out or thinking about is there room for a kind of deeper level of pacing guides. You can imagine we're only about six weeks out, but myself, Megan, and many other team members are trying to figure out what we could cobble together to support as many folks as possible because you can imagine most traditional curricula are not going to work well in a hybrid environment."

Megan: "Absolutely! I think people do need help in figuring out what Khan Academy resources could even be used on what particular days of assignments above and beyond the mastery pacing."

Sal: "Exactly! I think in this new framework, which is very likely to be at least the first half of the school year, but maybe this entire coming school year, that's where, you know, to Suzanna's original question, Khan Academy has all of the content items that we think could be very useful here. Can we make it easy for teachers to assign them and maybe pace it out over the course of the year?"

Megan: "You got it! You can do the course mastery and then determine what subset of those assignments or items can be used if teachers are able to get on Boom or Google Hangout to do those synchronous sessions."

Sal: "My gut sense is that’s what the curriculum is going to look like this coming year! Some teachers are going to be able to go further than that. I actually think, given how uncertain things are, if we're able to just get that level where kids are able to get pretty far in their mastery progress on Khan Academy, and they're able to do assignments, and the teacher is able to monitor and hold them accountable, etc."

Megan: "That sounds great!"

Sal: "I think, given the circumstances, which are very suboptimal, that would be a win given all of the uncertainty we're facing right now."

Megan: "So, it looks like we’re all out of time! Any parting words for folks before we leave?"

Megan: "Just really excited again to share that we have this brand new opportunity for educators all over the US, and that we are eager to hear back from you to see, you know, what you think and what we can improve to make things even better for you. So looking forward to hearing from all of you!"

Sal: "Thanks, Megan! And really special thanks to Megan and all the other people on the Khan Academy team who put together the Khan for Educators course. Obviously, they’ve been doing amazing work with educators and the amazing ambassadors for years now. This is just one more thing that we're trying to do, especially in the COVID environment, to help support teachers."

Megan: "Absolutely! And then, obviously, there's the Get Ready for Grade-Level courses. We're going to be creating kind of pacing guides, and learning plans, but we'll try to get as granular as possible. We're actually working with a major think-tank consulting company on what are best practices for back-to-school for districts."

Sal: "So we're trying to do whatever we can. We know this is going to be hard on parents, on students, and really hard on teachers. But you know, that's what we're thinking about day and night—what can we do to support you all? What can we do, especially over the next few weeks?"

Megan: "I also want to give a last shout out. I said this a couple of times as a side project: Schoolhouse.world has some amazing volunteers working on that. It’s a place where you can get free live tutoring, and right now we have several hundred tutors who are waiting—really incredible tutors, I have to say. I've been really impressed with the folks who have volunteered! So if you know young people or if you are a young person needing tutoring, especially in high school math right now, you can get some high-quality free tutoring, which, you know, no strings attached."

Sal: "That’s also a good announcement! So thanks, Megan, for joining. It's going to be interesting the next few months, but I’m lucky to work with you and everyone else and hopefully we'll be able to support all you teachers out there as positively as possible!"

Megan: "Thank you, Sal! It's a pleasure!"

Sal: "Thanks everyone! Thank you for joining and we're now down to doing this three days a week, so even the schedule's a little bit different, but yes—we'll see you later this week!"