- I Tim Vandenberg and I've been teaching for 25 years,
17 years in Hesperia, California,
sixth grade at Carmel Elementary School.
And Hesperia is a lower socioeconomic status area,
on average, especially among our student population.
100% of our students at this school
are on free reduced lunch.
The traditional model among most schools
is just moving kids along by age,
whether they've mastered the skills or not.
So by the time they come to me in sixth grade,
they've got so many gaps in their learning
because they haven't mastered the skills K through five.
It's extremely difficult for most teachers,
probably all teachers to really meet each kid
at their individual mastery level.
You're gonna have a third of the class tracking with you,
a third of the class wishing you'd move faster,
and a third of the class wishing you'd reteach
that a few more times.
My goals as a teacher using Khan Academy
is for my students to master as much
of the grade level specific skills as they can,
truly master the skills.
What I do is I assign to each student,
the whole class, an entire unit.
For example, expressions and variables.
And then that next day in class,
we'll have a class lecture.
Students take notes in their math portfolios,
and we teach the skill of expressions and variables.
Then they dive right into Khan Academy,
start the skills in that unit and work at their own pace.
And those who need extra help,
they have the Khan Academy videos and hints.
And I also monitor the class.
I rove around and help kids
whenever they need help.
(students chattering)
When students master skills on Khan Academy,
they're so excited.
Their self-pride and self-confidence
just overflows and they start to believe they can learn.
It's so important in the learning model
that students find out immediately
if they are properly grasping a skill.
Through Khan Academy they get
that instant feedback after every single problem.
Is a correct or not correct?
And if they didn't get a correct,
they get to find out immediately
from the hints exactly where they might have misunderstood.
It's so important for students
in this day and age of technology,
to learn to communicate and interact
interpersonally with others.
By using Khan Academy to teach students
to support one another, instead of just being locked
into a computer screen, they're actually interacting
with their neighbors, their friends in class.
They learn to interact with others in all of life.
So as many good teachers love to do,
they take their top successful students
and spread them out in the class
and give them two elbow buddies,
one on each side of them.
I'm monitoring, I'm encouraging first,
students to help each other.
It's so much better when students help each other first,
because then they become so much more self-sufficient,
self-motivated, self-rewarded.
Plus, those peer helpers feel so special
as they reward their friends
with the help that they give.
That really makes it possible
to promote and increase teacher to student interaction,
because now the teacher is spending their time
where students really truly need the help,
on 32 or more different levels
in a class of that many students.
I don't have one math class.
I have 32 math classes.
Every single student is working at their own pace.
Now I can meet students where they're at,
instead of where the middle of the class is at.
Because the Khan Academy grade level skills
are so well aligned with the Common Core standards for math,
I can trust that if my students master those skills
before the state test, they will do amazingly well.
And they have for years now.
After class, I always make sure
to look at the data progress reports
on the teacher dashboard.
That really helps me know who is succeeding
and who is really struggling and needs extra help.
And then I set my pace and remediation
and instructional support accordingly.
There is no way I could have known to that great detail,
who is really getting it
and who's not without the help of Khan Academy.
- [Students] Yes!
- I love being a teacher because I love it
when kids learn to love learning,
and when they love learning,
they don't need me for the rest of their life.
So as they grow up and become adults
pursuing their own interests,
they've learned how to learn on their own
and they have a passion and desire to.