20 Hours of SAT Prep Won’t Fit Into Advisory

This is a guest blog post written by Danielle Sullivan, Senior Partnerships Manager of the Northeast for Khan Academy. Learn more about how Khan Academy partners with school districts to improve SAT and graduation results → District SAT Prep and book time with Danielle directly from her calendar. What should schools do instead? Almost every school that is serious about SAT preparation eventually runs into the same problem: time. The course is about twenty hours. Advisory might be fifteen or twenty minutes, and that’s on a good day. Then you lose time to announcements, class meetings, schedule changes, assemblies, testing, and everything else that happens in a high school. So if SAT practice is only happening in advisory a couple of times a week, you are probably not getting anywhere close to twenty hours. You just aren’t. And yet, the first instinct is usually to try to squeeze more into advisory. Add another reminder. Ask counselors to push it harder. Ask teachers to protect the time. Keep trying to make a small block carry more than it realistically can. The schools I’ve seen make this work took a different approach. They stopped trying to find one big block of time and started spreading the practice across the school day. One question at a time The idea is really simple. Teachers start class with one SAT-style question connected to something they are already teaching. Not a worksheet. Not a whole lesson. Not twenty minutes of test prep. One question. A couple of minutes. Then move on. And this doesn’t have to live only in math and English. Science teachers can do it. Art teachers can do it. Health teachers can do it. Any class where students are reading, interpreting information, analyzing an argument, working with data, or reasoning through a problem can connect to skills students are going to see on the SAT. That is what makes the math work. But I think there is another reason this works too. When SAT practice only happens during a designated prep period, it can feel like this separate thing students have to do for a test in the spring. When those same skills show up throughout the school day, students start to see the connection between the test and what they are already learning. Reading carefully. Interpreting information. Reasoning through a problem. Explaining your thinking. Those are not SAT skills. They are school skills. One principal said something to me that really stuck: We aren’t teaching to the test. The test should reflect what we’re already teaching. Exactly. The ask has to be easy for teachers Of course, the minute you say “every teacher can help with SAT prep,” someone is going to ask the obvious question. What does that actually mean for teachers? Because if I’m an art teacher and someone tells me I now have to write SAT questions, my reaction is probably going to be, “Absolutely not.” And honestly, fair. This only works if the ask is small. A teacher should be able to say, “We’re working on proportions,” or “Students are interpreting a visual today,” or “We’re analyzing an argument,” and use Khanmigo to help turn that skill into an SAT-style question. The teacher doesn’t need to become an SAT item writer. ““““““That matters because one of the fastest ways to kill a good idea in a school is to make it one more thing teachers have to plan from scratch. If something adds twenty minutes to prep, it probably isn’t going to last. If it takes a minute or two and fits into something teachers are already doing, now you have a chance. Start earlier than you think One of the most useful things I heard this summer came from a principal whose school had a really strong year. What was interesting was that he spent a lot of our conversation talking about what he would change. Their school started using SAT bell ringers in January and continued through testing season. It worked. But his biggest takeaway was that they should have started in September. The more I thought about that, the more sense it made. A routine introduced in January feels like another initiative. A routine introduced in September is just part of how the school works. Students know what to expect. Teachers have time to figure out what works. Nobody is scrambling to create a new habit three months before the test. So if you are thinking about SAT prep in the fall, this is actually the time to start. Not January. Now. Time is only one part of it Of course, finding the time does not automatically make students care. The schools I saw getting real traction were doing other things too. Without that, a two-minute SAT question can quickly become another thing students click through before class starts. But I think the scheduling piece gets underestimated because we keep looking for a block of time that usually does not exist. Twenty extra hours are probably not going to magically appear in a high school schedule. The schools making this work stopped waiting for them to. Instead, they asked everyone in the building to carry a very small piece of the work. And that turns out to be much more realistic than trying to find another period. Learn more about SAT Prep for districts on our website: khanacademy.org/schools