By Sarah Robertson, Khan Academy’s principal product manager for Language and Literature

Khan Academy Writing Coach: Making Essay Practice Easier (and Feedback Better)

Effective writing instruction takes time—a lot of time. Time to find meaningful essay prompts. Time to set up assignments. And time to give quick, actionable feedback that actually helps students revise.

This winter, we’re introducing several Writing Coach updates designed to make teachers’ lives easier through every stage of the writing process. From a new Essay Assignments Library to smarter, more focused AI feedback, these changes aim to give teachers even more time back with grade-level appropriate, engaging assignment ideas and robust revision support for students.

A new way to assign essay-writing practice

One of the biggest challenges teachers face when it comes to writing instruction isn’t just teaching the skills—it’s finding and preparing the right materials.

The new Essay Assignments Library in Writing Coach helps solve that problem by giving teachers access to a curated collection of ready-to-assign essay prompts.

With the library, teachers can:

• Browse essay assignments by grade level (5–12)
• Filter by subject (ELA or social studies)
• Choose from different essay types, including persuasive, informational, and literary analysis
• Search by keyword and customize instructions before assigning

Instead of starting from scratch, teachers can assign high-quality essay-writing practice in seconds, freeing up time for instruction and feedback.

Explore library

New feedback categories aligned to common writing rubrics

In addition to the new essay library, we’re making improvements to how students receive feedback when they use Writing Coach.

We’ve recently migrated Writing Coach AI features to Gemini models and have redesigned our essay-feedback categories to better align with standard writing rubrics used in middle and high school classrooms in order to ensure that feedback is more comprehensive, specific, accurate, and aligned to students’ assignments than ever before.

New feedback categories aligned to common writing rubrics

These categories replace the previous set and are designed to help students focus on the most important writing skills at each stage of revision.

What each category supports

• Thesis & Focus: evaluates the essay’s purpose, main claim or idea, and overall cohesion
• Evidence & Reasoning: provides targeted feedback on selecting, integrating, and analyzing evidence
• Structure & Organization: helps students improve logical flow, paragraph structure, and transitions
• Language: expands beyond style and tone to address clarity, vocabulary, and sentence structure.

Together, these categories encourage deeper thinking and a clearer revision process.

Coming soon

A more guided essay-revision experience

We’re also redesigning how students interact with feedback in Writing Coach.

Instead of receiving all feedback at once, students will be able to move through revisions one category at a time and be able to review one suggestion at a time. They will begin with Thesis & Focus and move forward only after completing each stage.

This guided approach will:

• Reduce cognitive overload
• Keep feedback up to date as drafts change
• Encourage more students to actually revise

Our goal is for revisions to feel less like a marked-up paper and more like a one-on-one writing conference.

Built-in checks and multiple rounds of feedback

To support meaningful revision, Writing Coach will soon include:

• A pre-revision completeness check to ensure drafts are ready for feedback
• The ability for students to request feedback again after revising a category

We’re also improving feedback earlier in the process, such as during the outlining phase, so students can receive more precise, rigorous guidance before they even begin drafting.