Spend more than a few minutes searching for building an effective homeschool environment and you will be saturated with articles admonishing you of the importance of the ‘learner-centered’ teaching environment.
Basically, learner-centered instruction (LCI) boils down to:
- personalized learning activities
- social and emotional support
- self-regulation
- collaborative and authentic learning experiences
- assessing for learning
Sounds fancy! Let’s jump into this.
The homeschool advantage
Good news! By homeschooling your child(ren) you automatically have a head start in creating learner-centered instruction. The ‘learner’ in LCI is your child! You have cut a huge part of your life out of ‘normal’ and dedicated it to the education of this little dynamo of exuberance. EVERYTHING you are doing is focused on your kid, so of course it is learner-centered! Right?
Well, you do have a head start. But actually only in one area, the social/emotional support point.
You love your kids so much that you are giving them your all day/every day, you have fully invested yourself in their education. Your self-worth will, if it hasn’t already, become so wrapped up in their progress that you will feel, in your soul, every struggle and every victory. Depressed when they fall short, exuberant when they succeed. Because their success will reflect directly on you, as their teacher.
The only thing I will add is keep it positive. But you knew that already!
Personalized learning activities
I will confess something. I love Saxon math. Like, reeeeaaallly love it! As a post-career engineer I am still totally nerded out on statistics with calculus, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. I am good at math, like seriously good! So Saxon math is right up my alley, endless worksheets of drills and repetition to drive the points home, pushing the boundaries of where they ‘should’ be in understanding, super-complex bonus problems at the end of the chapter… pinch me I am in heaven!
But, (had to be a ‘but’ coming here!)….
The Saxon math curriculum, like any of the thousands of other curriculum you can go out and buy out there is made for everybody and anybody. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, ‘personalized’ about it. I love statistics, what if my daughter falls head-over-heals for set theory? What if my son likes math proofs? What if (please hold me) they don’t like math!!? What curriculum do you buy if your kid doesn’t like math?
You don’t, you build the lessons from scratch, lesson plans that speak to the interests and capabilities of your, unique, child. And it is ok, even preferred, to mix-and-match, a bit from Saxon, a bit from Khan Academy, a bit from that math book in the back of the library that hasn’t been checked out in so long that it still has a hand-written checkout card glued to the inside cover (remember them?)
In short, you build a personalized learning plan for YOUR child.
Maybe that plan won’t even look like a math classroom…
Get your kid outside, laying out next year’s garden plot – row length, plant density, soil depth, soil alkalinity, percentage of leaf damage from predatory insects, length of sunlight per day, angle of sun exposure, moisture percentage, temperature profiles….ITS ALL MATH!!
Anything they are interested in applying themselves and learning, involves math! Woodworking? Give me a harder one… clothes making – duh, you get the picture.
And this is just math, any of the other subjects needs to be tuned to your child as well! Build a learner-centered lesson, that takes into account the actual learning needs of of your child, not just what the publisher sold to you.
Self-regulation
Sounds suspicious, I know.
To be ‘learner-centered’, the learner needs to be invested in their path. Basically, you give your student a voice in their education path. You ask them what they want to study, within the bounds you set as their teacher and mentor of course. “What kind of plants do you want to grow in the garden this year, that you will be responsible for” You have them set their own goals. “Which book do you want to be able to read in a month?” “How fast do you want to type a 500 word letter?”
Here is a critical one: Have them conduct their own self-assessments. Have them grade that 5 pages of Saxon math homework. Record their voice reading, then have them grade themselves for reading clarity. I have my kids practice self-introductions, they then watch themselves on video and critique themselves.
My sons wrestle, and watch videos of their matches. One of my daughters practices Kenbu (a good example here, will post some video of my daughter’s performances in the future), a form of Japanese sword dancing, and also watches and critiques her own videos. You are already probably aware of how much harder they will be on themselves then you would ever be on them! My early teenage daughter is distraught when she makes the tiniest mistake, I spend more time trying to tell her that one misstep in a 15 minute performance involving a Japanese katana and in full kimono attire is not the end of the world!
Make them grade themselves.
A word of warning though, for those with multiple kids at home, be sparing about having them grade each other! Again, nothing new to you here, but it is amazing how much conflict overdoing that technique can cause!
Collaborative and Authentic Learning Experiences
Collaborative…OK homeschoolers, here is the time to fully face the one area that criticism of our chosen path is not entirely without merit. If you started homeschooling to protect your children from the outside world, they will struggle with enjoying the benefits that a collaborative learning environment can bring. An old saying, perhaps African in origin, goes: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Spend some time in most modern classrooms and you will see most teachers setting up small group study sessions, group projects, group debates, group discussions, groups this and groups that. Everything is groups! For a good reason, they work. A bunch of peer students working on the same project, towards the same goal will progress at an astounding rate (when done properly) and learn things far exceeding the limited range of your pre-planned lesson. How are you providing this advantage to your kid? For big families, six in my case, there are opportunities to have the siblings work together, and they do. But I only have one early-teen daughter, one 2nd grade little boy, one kindergarten child, etc. You should comb through the resources at your disposal to get them working with other kids their age, on something. Sunday School at church, homeschool groups and co-ops, library programs, cousins, etc. No, you don’t need them to collaborate on EVERYTHING, but homeschoolers can struggle to find the collaborative connection and I encourage you to find a way for this highly effective teaching strategy/philosophy to work its magic with your little charges. Find a way!
The authentic part of the heading is far easier for the homeschooler. A truck leaves Dallas at 50mph and a Lamborghini leaves New York at 120mph – Where do they collide headfirst and who survives? Yes it is a math problem, no it is not authentic. At no point in your child’s life will they come face-to-face with that problem. Give them real problems and projects to work out. Laying out their own garden plot, working out a chicken coop environment with attendant calculations for space/feed/etc., build a pinewood derby car together and race it – if you like, build two and crash them together while trying to predict where they will crash and where each car will end up after they stop moving (energy and momentum calculations). Give them something real! Get their hands dirty, pull splinters out of their precious little thumbs after building something with them, watch their creations break, or hug them when they hit their thumb with that hammer.. you get the idea. Don’t let the textbook give them a problem to work on that they KNOW is ridiculously contrived! You are not learner-centered if your problems and projects do not ring true for your student. Besides, you will have a lot more fun too!
Assessing for learning
This one is a sensitive one for homeschoolers. A lot of us have very strong objections to standardized testing. And that is what this ‘assessing for learning’ is right? Nope.
When you have 40 kids in your class, for 6 different classes a day (240 students!), you can’t give individualized assessments for each student. You just can’t. So teachers in that enviornment fall back on stadardized test. Boo! Hiss! But you don’t have that – you have one, or two, or six… you don’t have to, and you shouldn’t, just feed them tests and call it good. You are with them all day, you are more than qualified to assess if they learned the material. Maybe a paper test will work fine, maybe have them teach a sibling how to do long form division on the white board, have a family discussion on how George Washington changed from the beginning of the Revolutionary War to the end (an amazing study on character development if you are looking for a deep dive idea for your high schooler!)
The point is: How do you know if your student is learning, if you are not assessing? You must assess. To be learner-centered, you must know if the learning is actually centered on the learner! Not to satisfy the State of Alaska (or wherever you are) that you are teaching properly. Not to develop a portfolio for a college admission application. You must assess if your child is actually learning so YOU know if you are actually teaching! I read a story to my kids at night (well, most nights, Papa gets tired too!) Studies show that reading to your kids helps them develop their own reading habits and skills. But… does it? For my kids? How do I know if I don’t hand them the book and have them read? Or give little Joe responsibility for all the ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘and’ words while having Emily say all the ‘I’ ‘you’ and ‘said’ words? And then add another word to their list next week? Make sure your kids are learning, verify you are actually educating.
Conclusion
Creating a learner-centered homeschool is really not that difficult. We have a head start in a couple of categories, emotional support and individualized attention, but need to put some effort in bridging into collaborative learning opportunities. The rest fall in the middle, but really boil down into creating an environment where your child feels invested and responsible for reaching for their own learning future. In other words, make them ready to be adults!
