What Will Be Your Role in Home Schooling?
Surprising as it may seem, your role in home schooling doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be your child’s teacher. Sound confusing? This idea that there are different roles you could play in home schooling your child may surprise if you have assumed that you as the parent have to take on the traditional teacher role. But in fact, there are several options to consider about what your role in home schooling could be. As a homeschooling mom of four, and with one now a junior high school student (!), I have come to realize that there are various ways to nurture, relate to, and mentor your child besides being their primary teacher for every subject. In trying to help you sort out the options for your role in home schooling your child, I'm going to mention four main roles a home schooling parent may play. In a sense these are kind of artificial categories, and there is also some overlap. For instance, to a certain extent you can be a coach in any of the types listed below. But stick with me for a minute or two because I think you’ll find the distinctions helpful as you read on.
This is what most people traditionally think of when they think of home schooling. You plan the lessons or find the resources, help your child understand the material, and interact with him on the materials. One example of materials for this type of teaching is home school curriculum with scripted lesson. The traditional textbook method using materials such as A Beka would also usually come under this category, though depending on how much interaction you needed to give with them, a student could teach himself using textbooks. Caution: If you don’t have a lot of time or desire to be the Teacher, you may want to steer clear of highly scripted types of materials or ones written to the Teacher. If, on the other hand, the materials could be understood and used by the student to teach himself, you could use them as a coach.
The image that comes to mind here is the parent who is curled up on the couch with a great book reading aloud to the kids, as with Sonlight Complete Home School Curriculum or the scene where you are all doing some project relating to a historical time period as with Tapestry of Grace, as you can see from Tapestry of Grace's free Go To Egypt 3-week sample. There are lots of other options, but you get the idea. Learning is a shared journey. A big part of your role in home schooling as a tour guide is simply to be there, to enjoy the ride, answer questions, and find those out-of-the-way adventures that make a trip so enjoyable and memorable. Curricula like Sonlight and Tapestry of Grace are good at helping you know what to look for on your trip. Caution: If you don’t have the time to spend interacting with your child about this material (by reading aloud, leading discussions, helping with projects), you or your child might become frustrated with the fact that complex issues are raised about values and choices in the curriculum or books, but without your participation there may not be clear resolution. If you don’t interact regularly on the issues brought up by the curriculum, you might not know how to bring wisdom into relevant teachable moments. Sonlight’s Instructor’s Guides help guide you through these issues, as does Tapestry of Grace’s materials, but it may be a challenge to make the time if you have more than one child. Practically speaking, one of the considerations you'll need to factor in when deciding what your role in home schooling should be is to figure out how much time you have available at this point.
Arguably, a coach could be your role in home schooling with a more hands-on approach too, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just categorize it like this for now. The child learns on his own, and you provide the supportive environment and encouragement he needs for self-teaching. Just as an aside, you may think your child could never teach himself anything. Especially if you have a boy. I know, I have a son. However, letting a child teach himself doesn’t have to mean giving your child complete freedom with no boundaries or expectations for learning. Your role in home schooling as a coach does mean you can give limits and set certain expectations. You can look over our pages on the unschooling approach to find out more about a less structured self-learning method, or you can look over our review of the Robinson Curriculum to find out more about a more structured method where the goal is still for the child to teach himself. You may also be interested in Accelerated Christian Education's materials, which are self-paced, mastery-based materials. Still another resource is Joanne Calderwood’s Self-Teaching Manual (I'm the MOM; I Don't Have to Know Calculus!). I also really love her Home School Student Planners. You can actually use these with any home schooling method or whatever your role in home schooling is. I highly recommend them. These are some of the more well-known home school curriculum materials available to use if you want to have your child teach himself. Remember, helping your child learn how to learn is a process, not an overnight expectation. Your child will grow older, too, and of course you will rightly expect him to become more able to take responsibility for his education. So there are shades of gray in this area, as with many other areas of home schooling (isn’t that so often the case?!). But the main questions here are firstly how much, how early, and in what subjects do you want your child to teach himself? And secondly, what are the implications -- other than you have less work to do in lesson planning and grading? Just what does “self-teaching” mean when in day-to-day life? As someone who has used the self-teaching method with my own children (2nd and 5th grade at the time) I can tell you these are the questions I wish I had known to ask about self-teaching:
Caution: Self-teaching involves a lot more than just you not having to correct tests or plan lessons. It involves much more than your child just getting the "answer," or even in knowing how to get the "answer." Self teaching -- as in all teaching -- also relates to how do you make sense of the "answers." Thus, thinking through who will mentor and guide your child's worldview (as I mention in the questions above) will really be helpful for you in the long run. I would especially encourage you to talk them over with your spouse. When you look for curriculum for self-teaching, it will be important to consider what worldview it is coming from if your child will be using it to learn on his own a great deal.
Let me first say that I think that no matter what your role in home schooling is, obviously you will want to be your child’s cheerleader. Naturally, your role in home schooling (as in parenting in general) is to encourage him and show him that you believe in him. Of course, that isn’t your only role. Just because you are a cheerleader doesn’t mean you won’t have to be a "referee" at times. My intent in using the term “cheerleader” here is to distinguish that in this category someone else is basically calling the shots. Someone else is doing the planning and implementing the lessons, and giving feedback. Your role in home schooling is a bit more on the sidelines, but you can still give input and have discussions, of course. Your participation at some level with your child’s education doesn’t change, just your role in how you interact with your child. In this category you really have lots of options, depending in part on
Caution: You can read more about what to consider in online home schooling here. Some possibilities include tutorials or classes taught by a teacher with interaction between the students. These options still give you many of the advantages of having your child at home but your child would be able to have more outside interaction and accountability. There are both Christian and secular options you can check out on our online home schooling options page. Don’t forget there are also many other options for someone else who is right there in your community to do the teaching. Sometimes a college student may be a great resource to tutor your child in a particular subject. Or a community college, public library, co-op, or church might offer a class or two. When you think outside the box when it comes to your role in home schooling, you may find many other resources to help your child. An older sibling might have the gift of teaching and might love to help his younger sibling learn to read or do math. We’ve now looked at four ways you can be involved in your child’s learning. Your role in home schooling can be as a Each of these ways of relating has strengths and weaknesses. And you might find that the way you like to learn might well influence the role you want to play in home schooling your own kids. You might learn really well when someone teaches you, so you want to have this same kind of role for your own children. Nothing wrong with that. But just be aware that there are different options for your role in home schooling and your role may need to be one that you wouldn’t have expected when you first started out.So as you think through the different options for your role in home schooling, ask yourself which is the role you most want to have for your child right now? What does your child need? What do you need, especially as you try to build your relationship with that child? A teacher? Tour guide? Coach? Cheerleader? You may end up mixing and matching to a certain degree, and that’s okay, too. This is home schooling after all – you can do what is best for your family! If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to Contact Us. I sincerely pray this information will help you decide what your role in home schooling should be and what will work best for you and your child. Blessings on you in your journey. Leave Your Role in Home Schooling and Go to Site Map for more helpful articles Looking for something? Search for it here:
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