Name: 【TED】Sal Khan: Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores (Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores | Sal Khan)
Uploaded: 2017-03-16T13:40:06.000Z
Duration: 10 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm here today to talk about the two ideas that,

at least based on my observations at Khan Academy,

are kind of the core, or the key leverage points for learning.

I saw this in the early days working with my cousins.

A lot of them were having trouble with math at first,

because they had all of these gaps accumulated in their learning.

And because of that, at some point they got to an algebra class

and they might have been a little bit shaky on some of the pre-algebra,

and because of that, they thought they didn't have the math gene.

and they'd be a little bit shaky on the algebra.

when I was uploading some of those videos on YouTube,

and I realized that people who were not my cousins were watching.

And at first, those comments were just simple thank-yous.

I don't know how much time you all spend on YouTube.

Most of the comments are not "Thank you."

But then the comments got a little more intense,

student after student saying that they had grown up not liking math.

It was getting difficult as they got into more advanced math topics.

they had so many gaps in their knowledge they couldn't engage with it.

They thought they didn't have the math gene.

they took a little agency and decided to engage.

and they were able to fill in those gaps and master those concepts,

and that reinforced their mindset that it wasn't fixed;

that they actually were capable of learning mathematics.

And in a lot of ways, this is how you would master a lot of things in life.

It's the way you would learn a martial art.

In a martial art, you would practice the white belt skills

you would move on to become a yellow belt.

It's the way you learn a musical instrument:

you practice the basic piece over and over again,

this is not the way a traditional academic model is structured,

the type of academic model that most of us grew up in.

we group students together, usually by age,

and we shepherd them all together at the same pace.

let's say we're in a middle school pre-algebra class,

the teacher will give a lecture on exponents,

The next morning, we'll review the homework,

then another lecture, homework, lecture, homework.

That will continue for about two or three weeks,

And even though the test identified gaps in our knowledge,

I didn't know 25 percent of the material.

Even the A student, what was the five percent they didn't know?

the whole class will then move on to the next subject,

probably a more advanced subject that's going to build on those gaps.

It might be logarithms or negative exponents.

And that process continues, and you immediately start to realize

I didn't know 25 percent of the more foundational thing,

and now I'm being pushed to the more advanced thing.

And this will continue for months, years, all the way until at some point,

I might be in an algebra class or trigonometry class

And it's not because algebra is fundamentally difficult

It's because I'm seeing an equation and they're dealing with exponents

and that 30 percent that I didn't know is showing up.

imagine if we did other things in our life that way.

"We were told we have two weeks to build a foundation.

Maybe some of the supplies don't show up.

And two weeks later, the inspector comes, looks around,

says, "OK, the concrete is still wet right over there,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Sal Khan: Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores (Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores | Sal Khan)

potential

material

mindset

engage