Sal Khan and teaching for mastery

Sal Khan's TED Talk makes a lot of sense to me.

His point is, don't set a fixed time to cover some learning material.  And don't be satisfied with a passable level of understanding of that material, before moving on to the next topic/level.

Instead, set the content of what you want learnt, and make sure that is mastered before moving on to the next topic.  The length of time taken to master it is not important.  He says:

Instead of artificially constraining when and how long -- fixing when and how long -- you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcome, the A, B, C, D, F, do it the other way around.  What's variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what's fixed is that they actually master the material. ...

It will reinforce the right mindset muscles.  It makes them realise that if you got 20% wrong on something, it doesn't mean that you have a C branded in your DNA somehow.  It means that you should just keep working on it.  You should have grit.  You should have perseverance.

Very well said.  I agree completely.

For those of us who homeschool, and with only a few students to teach, it is easy to have this sort of mentality.

For teachers who have more students, it can understandably be trickier to accomplish.  Khan addresses this issue from 5 min 45 sec onwards, and is optimistic that new technologies in on-demand learning make it possible to do this in the classroom.

And while this all sounds very exciting and hopeful, I still do wonder how easy it is to find the right teaching point, with just the right nuance of explanation, with on-demand video teaching.  At this stage, I still don't feel confident to leave Mulan and Miya unsupervised on Khan Academy to watch the instructional videos and answer the questions on their own.  They still seem to do much better with my in-person interactive explanations than with the video explanations.

Nonetheless, good on Sal Khan for doing what he does, and I have no doubt that as these on-demand teaching materials get better and better, it will get easier and easier to find the right teaching point at the right time, and at least sometimes they will take over from teacher-dad's explanations.