Transcript
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I'm here today to talk about the two ideas that,
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at least based on my observations at Khan Academy,
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are kind of the core, or the key leverage points for learning.
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And it's the idea of mastery
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and the idea of mindset.
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I saw this in the early days working with my cousins.
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A lot of them were having trouble with math at first,
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because they had all of these gaps accumulated in their learning.
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And because of that, at some point they got to an algebra class
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and they might have been a little bit shaky on some of the pre-algebra,
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and because of that, they thought they didn't have the math gene.
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Or they'd get to a calculus class,
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and they'd be a little bit shaky on the algebra.
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I saw it in the early days
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when I was uploading some of those videos on YouTube,
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and I realized that people who were not my cousins were watching.
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(Laughter)
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And at first, those comments were just simple thank-yous.
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I thought that was a pretty big deal.
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I don't know how much time you all spend on YouTube.
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Most of the comments are not "Thank you."
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(Laughter)
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They're a little edgier than that.
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But then the comments got a little more intense,
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student after student saying that they had grown up not liking math.
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It was getting difficult as they got into more advanced math topics.
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By the time they got to algebra,
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they had so many gaps in their knowledge they couldn't engage with it.
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They thought they didn't have the math gene.
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But when they were a bit older,
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they took a little agency and decided to engage.
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They found resources like Khan Academy
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and they were able to fill in those gaps and master those concepts,
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and that reinforced their mindset that it wasn't fixed;
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that they actually were capable of learning mathematics.
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And in a lot of ways, this is how you would master a lot of things in life.
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It's the way you would learn a martial art.
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In a martial art, you would practice the white belt skills
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as long as necessary,
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and only when you've mastered it
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you would move on to become a yellow belt.
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It's the way you learn a musical instrument:
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you practice the basic piece over and over again,
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and only when you've mastered it,
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you go on to the more advanced one.
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But what we point out --
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this is not the way a traditional academic model is structured,
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the type of academic model that most of us grew up in.
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In a traditional academic model,
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we group students together, usually by age,
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and around middle school,
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by age and perceived ability,
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and we shepherd them all together at the same pace.
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And what typically happens,
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let's say we're in a middle school pre-algebra class,
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and the current unit is on exponents,
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the teacher will give a lecture on exponents,
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then we'll go home, do some homework.
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The next morning, we'll review the homework,
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then another lecture, homework, lecture, homework.
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That will continue for about two or three weeks,
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and then we get a test.
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On that test, maybe I get a 75 percent,
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maybe you get a 90 percent,
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maybe you get a 95 percent.
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And even though the test identified gaps in our knowledge,
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I didn't know 25 percent of the material.
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Even the A student, what was the five percent they didn't know?
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Even though we've identified the gaps,
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the whole class will then move on to the next subject,
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probably a more advanced subject that's going to build on those gaps.
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It might be logarithms or negative exponents.
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And that process continues, and you immediately start to realize
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how strange this is.
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I didn't know 25 percent of the more foundational thing,
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and now I'm being pushed to the more advanced thing.
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And this will continue for months, years, all the way until at some point,
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I might be in an algebra class or trigonometry class
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and I hit a wall.
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And it's not because algebra is fundamentally difficult
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or because the student isn't bright.
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It's because I'm seeing an equation and they're dealing with exponents
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and that 30 percent that I didn't know is showing up.
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And then I start to disengage.
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To appreciate how absurd that is,
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imagine if we did other things in our life that way.
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Say, home-building.
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(Laughter)
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So we bring in the contractor and say,
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"We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation.
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Do what you can."
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(Laughter)
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So they do what they can.
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Maybe it rains.
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Maybe some of the supplies don't show up.
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And two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around,
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says, "OK, the concrete is still wet right over there,
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that part's not quite up to code ...
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I'll give it an 80 percent."
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(Laughter)
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You say, "Great! That's a C. Let's build the first floor."
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(Laughter)
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Same thing.
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We have two weeks, do what you can, inspector shows up, it's a 75 percent.
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Great, that's a D-plus.
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Second floor, third floor,
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and all of a sudden, while you're building the third floor,
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the whole structure collapses.
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And if your reaction is the reaction you typically have in education,
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or that a lot of folks have,
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you might say, maybe we had a bad contractor,
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or maybe we needed better inspection or more frequent inspection.
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But what was really broken was the process.
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We were artificially constraining how long we had to something,
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pretty much ensuring a variable outcome,
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and we took the trouble of inspecting and identifying those gaps,
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but then we built right on top of it.
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So the idea of mastery learning is to do the exact opposite.
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Instead of artificially constraining, fixing
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when and how long you work on something,
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pretty much ensuring that variable outcome,
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the A, B, C, D, F --
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do it the other way around.
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What's variable is when and how long
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a student actually has to work on something,
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and what's fixed is that they actually master the material.
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And it's important to realize
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that not only will this make the student learn their exponents better,
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but it'll reinforce the right mindset muscles.
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It makes them realize that if you got 20 percent wrong on something,
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it doesn't mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow.
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It means that you should just keep working on it.
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You should have grit; you should have perseverance;
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you should take agency over your learning.
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Now, a lot of skeptics might say, well, hey, this is all great,
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philosophically, this whole idea of mastery-based learning
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and its connection to mindset,
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students taking agency over their learning.
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It makes a lot of sense, but it seems impractical.
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To actually do it, every student would be on their own track.
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It would have to be personalized,
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you'd have to have private tutors and worksheets for every student.
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And these aren't new ideas --
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there were experiments in Winnetka, Illinois, 100 years ago,
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where they did mastery-based learning and saw great results,
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but they said it wouldn't scale because it was logistically difficult.
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The teacher had to give different worksheets to every student,
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give on-demand assessments.
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But now today, it's no longer impractical.
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We have the tools to do it.
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Students see an explanation at their own time and pace?
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There's on-demand video for that.
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They need practice? They need feedback?
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There's adaptive exercises readily available for students.
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And when that happens, all sorts of neat things happen.
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One, the students can actually master the concepts,
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but they're also building their growth mindset,
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they're building grit, perseverance,
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they're taking agency over their learning.
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And all sorts of beautiful things can start to happen
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in the actual classroom.
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Instead of it being focused on the lecture,
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students can interact with each other.
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They can get deeper mastery over the material.
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They can go into simulations, Socratic dialogue.
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To appreciate what we're talking about
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and the tragedy of lost potential here,
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I'd like to give a little bit of a thought experiment.
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If we were to go 400 years into the past to Western Europe,
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which even then, was one of the more literate parts of the planet,
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you would see that about 15 percent of the population knew how to read.
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And I suspect that if you asked someone who did know how to read,
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say a member of the clergy,
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"What percentage of the population do you think is even capable of reading?"
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They might say, "Well, with a great education system,
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maybe 20 or 30 percent."
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But if you fast forward to today,
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we know that that prediction would have been wildly pessimistic,
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that pretty close to 100 percent of the population is capable of reading.
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But if I were to ask you a similar question:
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"What percentage of the population do you think is capable
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of truly mastering calculus,
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or understanding organic chemistry,
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or being able to contribute to cancer research?"
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A lot of you might say, "Well, with a great education system,
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maybe 20, 30 percent."
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But what if that estimate
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is just based on your own experience in a non-mastery framework,
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your own experience with yourself or observing your peers,
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where you're being pushed at this set pace through classes,
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accumulating all these gaps?
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Even when you got that 95 percent,
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what was that five percent you missed?
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And it keeps accumulating -- you get to an advanced class,
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all of a sudden you hit a wall and say,
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"I'm not meant to be a cancer researcher;
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not meant to be a physicist; not meant to be a mathematician."
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I suspect that that actually is the case,
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but if you were allowed to be operating in a mastery framework,
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if you were allowed to really take agency over your learning,
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and when you get something wrong,
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embrace it -- view that failure as a moment of learning --
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that number, the percent that could really master calculus
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or understand organic chemistry,
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is actually a lot closer to 100 percent.
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And this isn't even just a "nice to have."
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I think it's a social imperative.
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We're exiting what you could call the industrial age
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and we're going into this information revolution.
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And it's clear that some things are happening.
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In the industrial age, society was a pyramid.
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At the base of the pyramid, you needed human labor.
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In the middle of the pyramid, you had an information processing,
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a bureaucracy class,
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and at the top of the pyramid, you had your owners of capital
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and your entrepreneurs
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and your creative class.
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But we know what's happening already,
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as we go into this information revolution.
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The bottom of that pyramid, automation, is going to take over.
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Even that middle tier, information processing,
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that's what computers are good at.
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So as a society, we have a question:
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All this new productivity is happening because of this technology,
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but who participates in it?
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Is it just going to be that very top of the pyramid, in which case,
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what does everyone else do?
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How do they operate?
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Or do we do something that's more aspirational?
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Do we actually attempt to invert the pyramid,
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where you have a large creative class,
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where almost everyone can participate as an entrepreneur,
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an artist, as a researcher?
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And I don't think that this is utopian.
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I really think that this is all based on the idea
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that if we let people tap into their potential
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by mastering concepts,
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by being able to exercise agency over their learning,
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that they can get there.
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And when you think of it as just a citizen of the world,
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it's pretty exciting.
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I mean, think about the type of equity we can we have,
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and the rate at which civilization could even progress.
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And so, I'm pretty optimistic about it.
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I think it's going to be a pretty exciting time to be alive.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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