Picture this. You are driving away from a school with a sniffling (recently sobbing) six-year-old in the backseat on a Friday, and you know (know in the very center of your being) that you can’t take her back there on Monday. Or Tuesday. Or ever again. There are three weeks left in her school year, and a week and a half left before you have the summer off work.

That was me last April. I won’t go into the details of what led me to the decision to homeschool right this moment (though I did write a little about that here, if you’re interested). What I want to focus on is what happened between then (when I had never thought about homeschooling as a concept, let alone as something I would be doing) and now (when I feel not only pretty confident in what I’m doing in my own homeschooling practice but also pretty fascinated by the history, schools of thought, and powerful movements shaping homeschooling today).

See, I have a PhD in English, which means that the main skill I have in this world is analyzing something to death until absolutely everyone around me is sick of hearing about it, its infinite possible iterations, and the spin-off research that I’ve done thanks to that initial research. When I realized that my daughter wasn’t going back to a traditional school setting, I threw myself into frenzied research mode and started absolutely devouring theories, methods, and curricula.

It was exhausting, but it didn’t take me long to start filtering all of this information through my own well-established teaching philosophies (I have been an educator for over a decade, after all) and what I had learned about my daughter’s individual needs over the past six years of parenting her (and the behavioral therapy, occupational therapy, and play therapy she had attended).

What I arrived at wasn’t a particular method. I couldn’t find any one thing that worked for me from top to bottom. Instead, I pieced together a series of principles that would guide the choices we would make.

What makes the most sense to me when trying to figure out what I am doing and gain some confidence is to separate content from method.

Content is what I teach and method is how I teach it. By thinking about these as separate sets of decisions, I was able to make the process of choosing curricula (or choosing not to use a formal curriculum) for each subject more manageable.

For the most part, I didn’t have any problem with what my daughter was being taught in the schools she was in, and she never had any problem understanding the material. Since content wasn’t the root of our problems, I decided to start with designing a method first. It took some time, some experimenting, and lots of listening, reading, and thinking.

I plan to share with you some of the individual ideas that have spoken to me from the depths of blog posts, individual conversations, books, and academic journals, but for right now, I just want to share the guideposts I use when deciding day-to-day how to homeschool. Here is what I came up with.

My homeschooling method will be . . .

• Flexible
  I homeschool specifically because rigidity didn’t work well. My daughter needs literal flexibility. As in, she needs to move. Often. Vigorously. Until she breaks a sweat and pants a bit. Any schooling we do needs to allow for that movement, and that means that it needs to be flexible, too.
• Meaningful
  Work for the sake of work doesn’t hold much value in our home. Worksheets are welcome . . . if they serve a purpose. If I can’t name the specific meaning behind an activity, then we probably don’t need to be doing it.
• Scaffolded
  This is a term I picked up in my own educational experience as a developmental education specialist. Scaffolded education sets high standards and then provides the supports to help individual learners meet them over time, removing support as their abilities grow until they are eventually reaching the goals without support. At that point, it’s time to set new goals with new supports.
• Responsive
  My daughter does a lot of independent work. She prefers it that way. I do, however, have to make sure that I am paying attention to her interests, abilities, and reactions and change the material based on what I observe.

I can put any curriculum, any suggestion, any idea through the test of those four pillars, and if it comes out on the other side, it likely has a place in our homeschooling approach. If it doesn’t, then I can probably find something else. Having these four principles at the center of decision-making means I can read, read, read until my heart and mind are full and I can take what works and leave what doesn’t without feeling that sense of missing out or messing up. Having core principles allows the eclectic nature of our homeschooling to avoid descending into absolute chaos.

We prefer marginal chaos.

Photo by Callistus Ndemo on Unsplash