Hold on one moment, and we'll begin in about 10 minutes.

- [Woman] Begin.

- Okay everyone, this is Jeremy Schifeling

with Khan Academy.

Thank you so much for your patience

getting started this morning or this afternoon,

depending on where you're calling in from.

It is my extreme privilege to introduce you to Conor Corey.

He's one of the most awesome teachers

that I've met in a long, long time,

and just someone that I wish

was teaching my own kids

because of the incredible way

that he goes about engaging his own students.

So Conor, thank you so much for being with us today,

and thank you for sharing your expertise

with the larger Khan Academy community.

- [Conor] Thank you, it's been great to be here.

It's been a pleasure to be invited in.

- Absolutely, let me see

if I can get your webcam set up here.

Just go ahead and turn that on if you can.

All right, we're in business.

- All right. - So again,

thank you everyone, for making time out of the day.

I know, this is week two for many of us

as far as kids running around

while we're trying to serve our students.

Conor's in the same boat.

You have four kids, is that right, Conor?

- I do, and they are all at home.

My wife is distracting them in the other room right now,

and so if you hear screaming in the background,

that's coming from me.

- Well there you go.

That's the secret to being a great teacher

is having a very supportive spouse,

so thank you to her, and thank you to your kids

for letting us steal you away for about half an hour.

But I promise to make it super worthwhile

for everyone on the line,

and so I wanna start with a little bit

of your background as an educator.

Tell us a little bit about how long you've been teaching,

what you've been teaching, the students that you serve,

and then we'll go from there.

- This is my 17th year of teaching.

I spent the first 13 years of my career

teaching in the Philadelphia School District public schools.

We were on a contract issue.

For a few years, I went back to school

to go into administration,

and that's kind of really where I found my love

for curriculum and math, more than administration.

I, around my 14th year,

I took a job as a math interventionist,

which was kind of a new position

in Centennial School District,

but it was one that I thought was needed.

It was more of, every school has reading specialists

most of the time,

where students are pulled out

to rebuild a foundation for literacy,

but that foundation for math is sometimes skipped

as they go grade to grade,

so I was, for three years, I spent,

pulling students for small group instruction

to rebuild their mathematical foundation,

and then this year, I went back into the classroom

to teach middle school math,

which is a passion, obviously.

So I am back as a sixth grade math teacher this years.

- That's awesome, and tell us a little bit

about how you've been using Khan Academy.

- I've used Khan Academy for about 10 years now.

I think it came out of a need more than anything.

While in Philadelphia, as most large,

metropolitan school districts,

we're a little bit underfunded,

and some of the materials that we needed

were not available.

The class set of books was of 20,

but I had 34 students,

and they were kind of 10 years old.

So you had numerous wonderful pictures

drawn in by fifth graders over the 10 years

that resembled me sometimes.

But, so we had to find a way.

Also, most of my students weren't on level.

They were two years below level,

maybe some are a little bit advanced,

but getting that material

became red tape paperwork of,

well, maybe you have to fill this out

because we're gonna see if they're special education,

and it's, no, they're not special ed.,

they're just a little behind in fractions.

I just need the material.

Kahn Academy kind of gave me that for free,

and I was able to implement

almost a centers-based approach

like many literacy teachers already do

at the elementary level.

We kind of rotate our class each day in that way,

where I may teach one group of 10 students

on a third grade level if we're all working on geometry,

and then they'll rotate,

they'll work on Kahn Academy,

and then a project in the third station

that has to do with geometry,

but then the next group, it may be four grade,

and fifth grade after that,

and kind of try to hit their academic level overall

for each of them.

We may not get to the third grade student

on a third level to a sixth grade level that year,

but we will rebuild the foundation

so the vocabulary makes more sense

and they can strive further

rather than just kind of skipping along

and hope they pick it up.

- Very cool, so build those foundations

kind of like Tim Vandenberg

has been talking about in his Mastery Learning Webinar.

- Yes, and Tim, I share the same belief

as Tim most of the time.

We did many things of going back to kindergarten

and starting all the way over,

and it's doing fantastic.

- Very cool, and so, in the sense of the academic side,

I think one of the things that any follower

of your Twitter feed,

which I shared in the chat a second ago,

will notice is you really bring this joy

and this love of learning

to everything you do in the classroom

in normal times, in the best of times.

What are some of your most successful

engagement techniques for really getting your kids

excited about Kahn Academy,

and more importantly, just learning itself?

- I came to the belief a long time ago

that all kids, it doesn't matter your background

or where you're from,

they enjoy kind of embarrassing their teacher,

seeing their teacher look like an idiot,

doing things that they would not normally

be able to do in a school building,

and I figured attaching memories like that to my classroom

was always the best way.

I think it came about like,

it came out 10 years ago,

there before all the Fortnite dances

and everything like that.

There was a dance called the Wu-Tang

that all my students would just not stop doing,

and in the schoolyard, if you looked down at the schoolyard,

there's 200 kids in a circle dancing,

and one kid, he just walked by

and he sharpened his pencil and he started dancing,

and I was just kiddin' around and made fun of him,

I'm like, "That's it, that's all you got?

"You better practice before you go out to the schoolyard."

He started side, talkin' trash, he was like,

"You can't do it."

I'm like, "You were born in 2004.

"You don't know anything about Wu-Tang."

I'm like, "I got it."

Then they all wanted to see it,

and it was, "Okay, if you all get to 20%,

"I'll go out in the schoolyard and do it,"

and they loved it.

They worked so hard those next two weeks or so,

and then it kind of spiraled from there.

A kid had a water balloon in their desk one day and I,

the many reasons you wouldn't think

a kid would have a water balloon in his desk,

you almost had to stop and go,

what possessed you to think this is a good idea?

Then we started talkin' about,

"I'll let you throw water balloons at me

"if you guys get to 30%."

Those kind of memories, we just started doin' crazy stuff,

and I've worked with unbelievable staff

over the years that join in,

and we just try to get things

that they can't purchase, like certificates,

but more of memories that they wanna do.

- That's cool, and so what kinds of results

have you gotten with this approach,

like making yourself say,

"I'll do whatever it takes to get you to mastery?"

- I think you hit almost every angle of your students.

You have the introverted students

who may not wanna say they wanna study it,

and you have some of the, your most extroverted students

that are the ones screaming and always doing stuff.

You're getting all of them to work for a similar goal,

which is to embarrass you,

or even the other staff members.

We did one, you wouldn't believe.

When I was at Willow Dale for three years,

I had an unbelievable staff,

and one time we did a wheel,

it was called The Wheel of Doom,

and we put all the teachers names on it,

and they basically, whoever won LearnStorm

for that month, whoever had the highest growth,

that class came up, we made an assembly.

I had 16 teachers come up front

and sit there in chairs,

and they would spin this wheel,

and it would land on ketchup, mustard, mayonaise,

and they would just get to squirt it in the teacher's face,

and they had a blast

while 400 kids are in the audience

screaming and excited about math work they're doing.

So I think it was, things like that

just engage students more,

and whether they, the learning comes secondary.

It will always come

as long as they're excited about something.

- I love that.

So obviously, those are the best of times,

being their physically for The Wheel of Doom.

We are far from the best of times right now

as we chat, unfortunately.

What are you doing with your students today

to drive engagement in this remote learning environment?

What would you recommend from that toolbox of best practices

for everyone else listening right now?

- I mean, I'm going, I'm attempting,

always trying new things.

I'm attempting to do similar things

with just getting the students excited.

I think a lot of teachers are starting to run into

federal guidelines of online learning,

I think that's becoming a struggle,

but I've used Flipgrid throughout the year

to communicate, and now we're using kind of Zoom meetings

to see, just to get in touch with your students

and do things, not work that's required,

but voluntary for something to do.

Your students miss you, they do.

I miss them, and right now,

we're doing a TikTok challenge

because I know that's everything

my students are into right now,

so I put out a few assignments on Kahn Academy,

I said it's voluntary.

If you would like to join in, tell me,

and I put them in a class,