A New Series of Posts: Books About Teaching, Learning and Homeschooling

I believe we all know what it's like to need help. Whether we are homeschooling parents, professional educators, student mentors, instructors or coaches, we've all had moments when our own expertise wasn't enough. When that happens, where do you go for advice?

Back in the 1990s, before everyone started carrying the internet around in their pockets, my options were limited. I relied heavily on the library. Although I did my best to connect with experienced homeschoolers, that wasn't always an option. Where I live in rural New Hampshire, homes are widely scattered, and homeschoolers are even fewer and farther apart. So, to become a better parent and educator, I turned to the wisdom collected in books.

I started with books about homeschooling written by homeschoolers, but then I broadened my selections to include books written by education researchers, professional teachers and psychologists. I read about parenting, education, cognitive psychology, child development, and human motivation. These authors who shared their knowledge helped me to understand and form my own ideas about what it means to teach and learn. And, whenever I came across a particularly good book, I would start recommending it to other homeschoolers.


Books were so foundational to my experience as an educator that I can't seem to help someone who is thinking of homeschooling without mentioning at least one or two titles. That's why I've decided to write a series of posts on this blog about my favorite books, specifically the ones related to education, and what they have meant to me. I'll begin with the oldest and dustiest ones, the treasures I latched on to when I was just starting to think about homeschooling. Then I'll work my way up to more recent releases.

The first book in my series will be Homeschooling for Excellence by David and Micki Colfax.

While I'm writing these posts partly because I'd like to reflect back on what inspired me, I'd also like to start a discussion here about what inspires you.

If you'd like to join in, just post a comment below and tell me which writers, past or present, have most influenced your choices as an educator. Which ideas resonated with you—and which ones turned you off? What impact have the best (or worst) books about parenting and education had on you?

Teaching What You Don't Know Yet (But Want to Learn)

Something I experienced often as a home educator was the desire to help my kids learn about a subject that wasn't exactly my area of expertise. In general, I had three choices:

1. Connect with an expert. Find someone who was proficient and ask if they would be willing to offer guidance and respond to questions as my child learned. This was an easy and obvious method, but it was also expensive, especially if the expert was a professional educator.
2. Encourage autodidactic exploration. Provide books, software, study groups—whatever was needed to enable my child to be self-taught, to figure things out independently through a process of trial and error. This method worked quite well when my kids felt passionate about a subject or were intrinsically motivated to develop a skill.
3. Become proficient enough to be the teacher.  

Admittedly, the third option requires a bit of ingenuity. How could I teach something that I had yet to learn myself? The most sensible thing would have been for me to teach subjects in which I had received formal instruction in the past. To some extent, I did exactly that when I helped my kids with math, science, and writing.

At other times, there were subjects or skills I was happy to learn along with my kids. My geeky self reveled in the whole process of sifting through books, researching subjects, exploring, asking questions and (eventually) finding answers. I loved discovering things together. I savored the moments when my kids surpassed me and became the ones doing the teaching.

How Does It Work, Exactly?

When I agreed to teach classes to groups of homeschooled kids who weren't my own, I took the job very seriously. Essentially, I did what I had been doing all along with my own kids, but I approached the task in a more focused, organized way. I assigned myself the following responsibilities:

1. Choosing resources carefully. I researched books and related materials to find gems that would be worth using. This was probably the most time-consuming step in the process but well worth it to avoid the mind-numbing drivel that's marketed as "educational" but can only be described as tedious. 
2. Preparing a tentative reading list (supplemented by a movie list, project list, field trip list, etc.). These proposed lists would always be significantly more extensive than what I would ever end up using during the year, but they weren't wasted effort. Having a readily available list of alternatives made it easier to improvise and come up with substitutions when something that looked good initially was disappointing. 
3. Planning and preparing well enough to stay one step ahead of my kids. Before I could teach, my understanding of a subject had to be at least a few grade levels ahead of what my children were learning. This was easy when they were very young but got progressively harder as they got older. By the time we were homeschooling high school, I had to be consulting college and graduate-level texts. 
4. Studying in advance, then studying again. Prior to the start of the school year or semester, I would typically read the books (and watch the movies) I intended to recommend to my children plus one or more advanced texts. Then, during the year, I would re-read all the books in parallel, as my kids read them. So, for example, as they read about the American Civil War, I read about the American Civil War—in their books and mine.  
5. Continuing to learn alongside my kids. By re-reading, or at least skimming, all the books as my kids read them, I was able to keep certain subjects in the forefront of my mind so I'd be prepared to respond to questions and recognize opportunities for related projects or activities. So, while I might not have been an expert on the American Civil War all the time, I was at the time they needed me to be. I also used the internet and connected with experts to get answers to questions that we couldn't answer on our own. 

Did I do this for every subject, every year? Of course not. I picked the subjects I would "teach" from one year to the next, and then I worked with my kids to cobble together a reasonably well-rounded course of study that included autodidactic, experiential and teacher-led learning (for the subjects that I wasn't as interested in studying along with them).

The Challenge

Were there any drawbacks to this approach? The short answer is yes. I recognized all along that my relative lack of expertise could be considered a disadvantage—for example, a more knowledgeable teacher could have provided with confidence more immediate, accurate answers to students' questions. When I was asked, "Is this right?" I always wanted to respond with a simple yes or no. There were times when it would have been so much easier if only I could have known the answers instead of having to grapple and search and say "I'm not sure." What made me think I could teach history or psychology or political science without a degree in those subjects? Was I overconfident, unable to see this approach as a case of the blind leading the blind?

I think all home educators—likely all teachers—know what it feels like to be asked questions we can't answer because we lack the expertise in a particular subject. I can't shrug the feeling off as inconsequential; it can be painfully frustrating and discouraging to feel useless in that moment. However, I'd argue the experience makes us even more conscientious about checking answers to be sure the ones we do give are either accurate or clearly identified as in need of verification.

The Optimistic Model of Error

In her fascinating book, Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz describes an "optimistic model of error." According to this model, there is value in making mistakes. Not getting things right the first time or all the time leads to all sorts of benefits. As Shultz writes in Chapter 14 ("The Paradox of Error"): 

"Awareness of one's own qualms, attention to contradiction, acceptance of the possibility of error: these strike me as signs of sophisticated thinking, far preferable in many contexts to the confident bulldozer of unmodified assertions." 

"When we are aware that we could be wrong, we are far more inclined to hear other people out. [...] In love, as in medicine, as in life more generally, listening is an act of humility. It says that other people's ideas are interesting and important; that our own could be in error; that there is still plenty left for us to learn." 

Being an effective guide alongside means being willing to admit you have "plenty left to learn." It doesn't mean there's no such thing as a correct answer. It just means you haven't cornered the market on them.

The Most Useful Lesson

I believe "I don't know" is a beginning, not an admittance of defeat. Maybe that's why I've always felt there was something beneficial about my not having all the answers as a home educator, because it allowed me to show my kids by my example that we all start out by not knowing. Instead of being an encyclopedia filled with answers, I was a role model for a work in progress. I showed them that solving problems, conducting research, and developing new skills is a process of trial and error, not something that gets handed to you in a neat little curriculum package. Of all the things my kids learned, I think that lesson has been the most useful to them.

Can a Class Be Too Small?

In his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell opens a can of worms when he asks the question, "Can a class be too small?" When it comes to the number of students in a classroom, most of us assume smaller is better. I know I do. The low student-to-teacher ratio makes sense to me intuitively: the fewer students a teacher has in his or her class, the more individualized attention each student would receive.

And yet, Gladwell argues that "The small class is potentially as difficult for a teacher to manage as the very large class size." To test his theory, Gladwell polled a large number of teachers in the United States and Canada. In David and Goliath, he quotes some of those teachers as they offer plausible explanations for why small class sizes are problematic:

• Interactions are too intense. While there are, presumably, fewer interactions in a small class for a teacher to manage, the interactions that do occur are more difficult to handle. "There is simply no way for the cantankerous kids to get away from one another." There's no place for students to hide. According to one teacher, "the students start acting 'like siblings in the backseat of a car.'" 
• Insufficient "critical mass" for discussions and group activities. As a middle school teacher explains, "students are awkward and self-conscious and anxious about seeming too smart. Getting them to engage . . . can be 'like pulling teeth.'" Also, as one teacher states, "It's difficult to play games . . . the  momentum just isn't there." 
• Lack of peers at a similar academic level within a class.  In a really small class, it is harder to find others who are just like you. There are no subgroups. Complains one teacher, "The chances that children are surrounded by a critical mass of other people like them start to get really low." As one teacher explains: "What you need [as a student] is to have people around you asking the same questions, wrestling with the same issues, and worrying about the same things as you are, so that you feel a little less isolated and a little more normal." 
• Lack of diversity in discussions. Fewer students means fewer (if any!) participants in a discussion. If the group is too small, "it's like they have a muzzle on." 

The magic number for class size, according to the teachers Gladwell polled, seems to be between 18 and 30 students. Since I have trouble understanding why a teacher would actually prefer to work with so many students at one time, I would like to contrast my experiences as a homeschooler with the experiences of the teachers Gladwell interviewed. The main question I'm attempting to answer is this:

Exactly what is it about certain settings—in particular, the various discussion-based classes that are taught by homeschooling parents like myself—that makes small class sizes desirable?  

(Although my response is necessarily based on my experiences as a home educator, I imagine there are many other situations where small class sizes are preferable, too.)

Excuse My Absence: November Is National Novel Writing Month

For the past couple of years, I have set aside time during the month of November for National Novel Writing Month. Although I've yet to take my "novels" to the next stage to have them published, I have enjoyed the process immensely. One of the highlights of my years of home educating has been to participate in NaNoWriMo with my kids.

I have to thank my kids for this. They were the ones who discovered NaNoWriMo. When my oldest daughter was around 15 and an avid writer, she successfully completed the challenge: writing 50,000 words in 30 days. Her younger siblings, who were only nine and twelve at the time, entered the competition, too. Although they didn't reach the 50,000 word goal that first year, they got a taste for writing that stayed with them.

When Play and Experimentation Aren't Enough

I love to watch toddlers at play—totally engrossed in what they are doing, blissfully unselfconscious. While nearby adults provide safe boundaries and may be consulted occasionally for help or encouragement, toddlers are at their best when they are self-directed. For long stretches of time, they tinker with the objects in their environment and use a process of trial and error to discover how things work.

What if people of all ages could learn everything they ever needed to know on their own, simply by tinkering? There's no doubt that we can learn a lot without any formal instruction or assistance, but not all of us have the genius of Michael Faraday (one of "Six Uneducated Amateurs Whose Genius Changed the World") or Kelvin Doe, the African teen who taught himself how to build batteries, generators and transmitters:


The rest of us ordinary mortals usually find that tinkering only takes us so far. Eventually, we get stuck and our learning levels off. Maybe we don't care because we're content with the level of learning we've achieved. For example, I learned all I wanted to know about paper quilling from a Klutz book and a few afternoons of tinkering. Then again, maybe we will care a great deal, because our passion is to become the best writer, mathematician, or musician we have it in us to be. When my music-loving daughter wanted to take her self-taught guitar playing skills to the next level, she sought help from a professional musician.

Nurturing Interest-Based Learning

"On some level we know that if we become really involved with an area of knowledge, we learn it—with or without School, and in any case without the paraphernalia of curriculum and tests and segregation by age groups that School takes as axiomatic. We also know that if we do not become involved with the area of knowledge, we'll have trouble learning it with or without School's methods. . . . you can learn without being taught and often learn best when taught least." —Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (1993), p. 141.

Seymour Papert coins a new term, "instructionism", to make a distinction between giving someone directions when they ask for them (instructing) and insisting that someone is dependent upon a constant stream of directions at all times (instructionism). There's nothing wrong with teaching per se—tutorials, demonstrations, and explanations all serve a purpose—the mistake is in the cultural mindset that assumes we can learn only when a teacher decides what, when and how we should learn. 

In a school setting, teachers generally do not have the freedom to allow students to pursue their own interests at their own pace. Classes are organized by age, and curriculums are designed with a specific scope and sequence: in fifth grade, everyone must study U.S. history, earth science, and the metric system. Weekly lesson plans dictate what will be taught (and, hopefully, learned). There's a practical reason for this: when you have large numbers of students to educate, it's more efficient.

Although it's possible to follow a similar approach to homeschooling, and some do, it isn't necessary. In fact, it may even be counterproductive. If your goal as a home educator is to empower your children to learn on their own, why not begin by allowing them to follow their interests and see where they lead?

"Well, sure," you may say, "That's fine if my kids happen to be interested in reading, writing, and arithmetic. But what happens when they aren't?"

"Math-Speaking" Adults as Role Models

To say that parents and teachers are role models for children is to state the obvious. We do our best to avoid swearing, show kindness to strangers, and generally be on our best behavior in front of our kids. But how many things are our kids learning from us that we never intended to teach them? Those of us who spend an unusually large number of hours in the company of our children are perhaps most apt to torture ourselves with this question.

Some might argue that if I had chosen a different approach to homeschooling I wouldn't have worried so much about what my children were (or were not) learning from me. A formal curriculum, one which covered every subject my children "needed" to know, would have provided uniform and consistent lessons that would make irrelevant my personal aptitudes (or ineptitudes). After all, if the textbook publishers and vendors at homeschooling conferences are to be believed, the "right" curriculum is all an instructor needs to be successful.

As it was, I decided to skip the curriculum-based approach and experiment with various ways of supporting my kids as they learned. I worked to redefine my role as a teacher. Instead of asking how I should teach a subject such as math or writing, I asked myself:

How does a parent who isn't directly teaching a subject, such as math, cultivate an environment that nurtures the type of thinking and skills that the subject requires?