By Sarah Robertson, Khan Academy’s principal product manager for Literacy and Classroom Experience
On Sunday’s 60 Minutes AI in Education segment, Anderson Cooper demoed parts of Khanmigo Writing Coach, our AI-powered writing platform, with an essay he wrote in the 6th grade.
When we launched Khanmigo Writing Coach this fall, the irony was not lost on me that of all the things humanities teachers would say they need right now, “more AI” is probably not on the list.
But here’s the thing—with all good products, the technology is just the means to the end. The focus is on the problems we’re trying to solve, the human outcomes we’re trying to achieve, and the real-life classroom environments where our solutions will ultimately be used.
In the case of writing instruction and practice—something I am all too familiar with as a former English teacher—the pain points are clear. But when ChatGPT was released in 2022, it didn’t just introduce new pain points for teachers. It also introduced new ways to solve those pain points, along with the ones that have existed for decades.
During filming of the 60 Minutes episode, Cooper and I spoke for an hour about what it’s like to teach and learn writing today. The Writing Coach portion of the episode included only 2 minutes of the full interview, so here are some additional takeaways that I think are worth sharing.
Learning to write still matters, but how we teach writing needs to change.
Even in a world where AI can produce written output, the act of writing remains a distinctly human practice, with real human value.
As Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” The process of writing has always been just as valuable—if not more—as the product. Not only is writing akin to critical thinking, but research has also shown significant psychological benefits among people who write to process their experiences, ideas, and beliefs.
But for a number of reasons, writing instruction in schools has traditionally been more focused on the product—specifically, the evaluation of writing outputs. With AI, I believe we need to shift more attention to the writing process.
Students are not getting the writing practice they need. Teachers do not have the resources to consistently give students the support and feedback they deserve.
The National Commission on Writing recommends that students in middle- and high-school spend a minimum of 60 minutes per day writing. Only a third of students get half that, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Relatedly, only 24% of 8th & 12th grade students met grade-level writing standards on the most recent NAEP assessment.
This should not be a surprise, given students need both writing practice and detailed, actionable, timely feedback to meet grade-level standards. When the average secondary humanities teacher has 100 students, even if they limit themselves to 10 minutes per essay, it would take a teacher 17 hours to provide feedback on each student’s first draft. Two consequences of this are that students are not assigned enough writing and do not get enough feedback. Another consequence is teacher burnout and attrition.
Student voice is important. Their written work should be read and evaluated by teachers.
I don’t believe in tools that “outsource” the work of evaluating student writing to AI. Nor do I believe in tools that “suggest” writing improvements to students for them to simply accept.
What message are we sending students by asking them to work hard to convey their ideas and beliefs in writing, only to give them no human audience?
Student writing should be read by humans, but that shouldn’t prevent them from using technology (under the guidance of their teachers) to improve their writing skills. I’ve never met an English teacher who chose their career because they love marking up papers. Great teaching is about listening to and responding to student voice and ideas, working closely with the students who need the most support, building trust and relationships with students, and celebrating their wins. It’s not about the red pen. Let the AI help with things like the red pen, so teachers actually have the bandwidth for the human work that matters most.
There is more than one solution to these problems.
In a perfect world, students would get frequent writing practice and would have undivided attention from teachers throughout the writing process. Teachers would be able to immediately give students precise, actionable, and clear feedback.
Unfortunately, we do not live in this world. I wish we did. Until we do, teachers and students both need more support. We can decry large class sizes, underfunded schools, and the proliferation of technology that hurts student learning more than it helps them. But I don’t believe in throwing our hands up in hopelessness—I believe in building tools that can actually help.
This is why we built Khanmigo Writing Coach.
Khanmigo Writing Coach is not an evaluative tool that uses AI to grade student writing so that teachers do not have to actually read student essays.
It is not a tool that replaces human interaction with AI interaction in the name of efficiency, nor is it a tool that claims that AI feedback is better than human feedback.
It is not a tool that makes the process of writing more efficient, by making automated suggestions that students can simply accept to improve their writing.
Writing Coach is an instructional tool that empowers teachers to give students more writing practice, more support, and more feedback—without the burnout. It’s a tool designed and built by teachers to produce better writers, not just better writing.
I’m so proud of the team that built Writing Coach. I can’t wait for all teachers to have access to it soon. Join the waitlist to be the first to know when it’s available.
