Curated work can help develop student understanding

We’ve been having many conversations with history teachers to understand their challenges and how we can help. Andy wrote about a method we used to structure those conversations: We wrote up short pitches on cards and asked teachers to sort them based on how valuable they seemed.

Each pitch described how students might write and interact with each others’ responses to open-ended questions.

But none of the pitches promised curated responses — responses crafted by Khan Academy to further develop student understanding.

Teachers quickly pointed out that gap. They had many different ways of talking about curated responses: sample work, model work, worked examples, exemplars. But pretty much every teacher agreed that they were indispensable for helping students develop their understanding.

We went back and thought about why curated responses are useful. We came up with 2 reasons:

1. Instruction. Curated responses can do some of the “modeling” that a teacher otherwise might do. For example, a curated response might be designed to make really great use of evidence. It might be annotated in a way that helps students understand what makes this usage exemplary.

2. Scaffolding. Curated responses can be written in a way that makes them perfect for a particular task. For example, a curated response might have a particular weakness to be improved, or it might have a piece missing. In this way, curated responses can make it possible for a student to complete tasks they might not otherwise be able to. In other words, they can increase the zone of proximal development.

Whether they’re designed for instruction, scaffolding, or both, curated responses must be carefully designed to ensure they develop understanding. Fortunately, Khan Academy has a team of talented content specialists up for the challenge.

But what happens when you don’t have content specialists? Is it possible to find curated responses from a pool of un-curated, student-created work?

We think the answer is yes. In aggregate, student engagement (upvotes, highlights) can bubble up exemplary responses.

And through student markup (tag the thesis, score this based on a rubric), responses can be given context that makes it possible to conduct scaffolded tasks (find the thesis, explain the grade).

But! This only works if students are learning and engaged as they add context to their own responses and the responses of their peers. When does “Highlight the thesis” feel like a game? When does it feel a chore? When does it provoke? When does it bore?

A lens we continually apply as we explore ideas for marking up peer work is: Does this feel like going to the DMV? If it does, we can safely throw the idea out.