What I Really Think about Homeschool Methods

Pam Barnhill [00:00:01]:
Are you ready for homeschooling to feel joyful again? Do you long for support as you learn alongside your kids? Welcome to Homeschool Better Together, a podcast about building a homeschool experience that works for your family. I’m Pam Barnhill, and it’s time to step out of the overwhelm and into the wonder. Let’s do this. I am starting off today with a little confession. It is mid July when I am recording this. Well, okay, a third of the way through July. I think it’s about July 11th. I lose track of the days in the summer.

Pam Barnhill [00:00:43]:
But I have yet to begin any homeschool planning. I haven’t started a single bit of it. You might be shocked at this because traditionally, I have been an early homeschool planner. Now I will say I have already looked at some curriculum, and I’ve thought about different subjects that the boys might be taking next year. I’ve actually really thought out some different plans in my head and already discarded them based on some of the behavior of my children. Things that they have told me, yes, mom, I’m really gonna do this summer, and they haven’t done. And so some of this project based learning that I was thinking about having them do next year, I’m realizing will only be frustrating for me. So we’re probably gonna go a pretty traditional school route next year, and I’ve definitely thought about what books are we going to read.

Pam Barnhill [00:01:40]:
But have I sat down and started making a plan? No. Am I worried about that? No. And the reason is because I have been following the autopilot planning process for so many years. Last year, I didn’t even use any of my forms. I just simply pulled out a sheet of notebook paper and jotted down my homeschool plans on the piece of notebook paper. I planned my homeschool year in a few hours on the front and back of a piece of notebook paper last year. I just wrote down some goals for the kids because I already have my vision. I jotted out a course of study, and then I put down the resource that we were going to use for each subject.

Pam Barnhill [00:02:24]:
Now I did use a lot of open and go resources last year, and we’ll probably do something pretty similar this year. So I’m thinking I may just pull out that piece of notebook paper and start planning again. But that’s the beauty of it. Once you follow the process for so long, the planning becomes second nature. You can take that big picture, choose the things that are really important, and get the plan in place pretty quickly. Now I still filled out my calendar with my magic number and all of that stuff just like we teach in the autopilot program, but it was quick and easy for me to do. Now what if you’re like, Pam, this autopilot thing, it sounds really amazing, but I do not have the same experience that you do. Well, the good news is in the autopilot program, we have these pacing guides.

Pam Barnhill [00:03:16]:
And there is one set of pacing guides where we walk you through how to plan your entire homeschool year in a weekend following all the steps that are in the autopilot program. So if you, like me, have waited a little long to get your homeschool planning done, Go check out Put Your Homeschool Year on autopilot, and those pacing guides are inside. We will help you get it done. And now, on with the rest of the podcast. Way back in 2011, I wrote this blog post in which I coined the term uschoolers. Yep. I was making up words at that point. And I was making up words, because I was really struggling to find my place in the world of homeschooling.

Pam Barnhill [00:04:08]:
Like, which homeschooling method would fit me and what I was doing the best. Even though Olivia was only 6 years old at the time, I had already been researching homeschooling methods for years years from the time she was 2. And so, I was frantically trying to fit what we were doing into one of these methods. When I threw up my hands and said, you know what? I’m not gonna do that anymore. We’re just going to be us. And therefore, the term us schooling was born, and that’s what we’ve done ever since then. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything to do with homeschooling methods. And it also doesn’t mean that there’s not some good in them.

Pam Barnhill [00:04:50]:
And that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. Kind of the good, the bad, and a little bit of the ugly of homeschooling methods. So a few weeks ago on my YouTube channel, I had done a video all about different trends that I was seeing in the homeschool world. Just a few observations about homeschoolers today that were new and kind of different than things that homeschoolers were doing or trends that homeschoolers were doing before And things like we have way more working homeschool parents. We have way more parents who never really intended to homeschool, but ended up homeschooling because homeschooling turned out to be a really great thing for them during the COVID pandemic, or because they realized the lack of instruction that was going on in schools and just how bad it was. And they decided, you know what? I can do a better job. So for whatever reason, since 2020, they’ve decided to keep their kids at home. And one of the trends that I talked about that kind of raised a little bit of ire in the comments was this idea that homeschooling parents these days don’t always have a lot of time to research homeschool methods.

Pam Barnhill [00:06:04]:
And whether you think that’s good or whether you think that’s bad, I think there’s some benefit to it and some detriment to it. The fact that the matter remains, if you don’t have time, you don’t have time. We would all like to eat very clean organic foods, but if you don’t have the money to do that, you can’t beat yourself up for not having the money to do that. You just do the best you can. And so if you don’t have time to research homeschool methods, don’t beat yourself up for that. Do the best you can. Can they be helpful though? And the answer to that is, I think so. I think homeschooling methods at times can be really helpful, but then I also think they can be harmful as well.

Pam Barnhill [00:06:45]:
So let’s back up and talk a little bit about what exactly are these homeschooling methods, and maybe you haven’t even heard about them. I know that was the case for me. I had an English degree and I had a minor in education. I had taken all of these educational pedagogy courses in teaching middle and high school English. I’d taken an ed psychology course, and I had taught for 7 years. And then I came into home schooling and started reading about all of these different methods of education. And I was like, I’ve never heard of any of these. The only method that I had heard of that had gotten a little bit of lip service in my college education classes was Montessori.

Pam Barnhill [00:07:25]:
And when I say a little bit, I really mean a little bit. They talked about her for, like, maybe part of one lecture. She got just a few paragraphs in the ed psychology textbook. So even then, it wasn’t a lot. And so what we have to realize is when we think of the term school, we are thinking of a progressive model of education. And that model of education has only really been around and in use for about a 100 years now. So ages and ages before that, humans were educated in lots of different ways that were different than how we typically think about education these days. And they’ve been around for a lot longer.

Pam Barnhill [00:08:08]:
I’ll just go on and say it. If you are in the same place I was and you had never really heard of a lot of these different homeschooling methods, I have a cheat sheet for you. This is a blog post that I wrote a few years ago. It’s still very much up to date and very relevant, and you can go and peruse it. I’ve laid everything out for you in bullet points, and I’ve got a downloadable cheat sheet you can use. And if you’re interested in any of these other methods of education, there are a couple things you can do. First of all, I’m really proud of these. I’ve got a series of interviews with homeschooling moms who use each and every method.

Pam Barnhill [00:08:43]:
And so I give each one of those moms a fair shake, a space to talk about which method that they enjoy and how they use it in their family. And I think that’s really important that we give a judgment free zone so people can talk about the methods that work for them. Because what we’re gonna find is that different methods work for different people. Right? So you can listen to each and every one of those interviews. I also have the little downloadable cheat sheet for you. And on there, it gives you extra resources. So if you’re like, I’m really interested in this unschooling thing, or I’m really interested in reading more about classical education, I’ve got some resources. I kind of point you to the next step you can take to read more about those things.

Pam Barnhill [00:09:30]:
So let’s talk a little bit about why it might be good to look at these different methods of homeschooling. And the reason why is because so many of us come into homeschooling and we don’t know anything about them. And the beautiful thing about a lot of these homeschooling methods is that the anthropology precedes the pedagogy. And that’s a quote from, I believe it was David Hicks and norms and nobility. But what we do in our education, our pedagogy really depends on our anthropology or what we think about men, what we think about humans, what we think about children. And a lot of times, the progressive model of education, the school model that we’re so used to really believes things about human beings that, as Christian homeschoolers, we don’t necessarily think are true. And so that was one of the greatest gifts for me as I got into thinking about education differently by looking at Charlotte Mason homeschooling and looking at classical homeschooling was that I started to learn to think about the child differently. And I would always tell you, yes, children are born persons.

Pam Barnhill [00:10:42]:
And yes, they are made in the image of God. But it wasn’t until I really started thinking about that and how it affects the way I teach that it started to have a big impact on our homeschool. And without thinking those thoughts, without thinking about those things, without reading some of those work, we never make those connections. And that’s one of the reasons why I think thinking about these different homeschooling methods can be really helpful. And so when you look at a method like classical education and when you look at a method like Charlotte Mason, when you look at a method like unschooling, these all start with very specific thoughts and understandings about who the child is and what is their place in the world and what is their relationship with the teacher or the parent. And so it’s really fascinating and interesting to take a look at some of those things. And even though I proclaimed us us schoolers and I said that I was not going to slavishly adhere to any single one. So many of those methods did inform the kind of homeschooling that I was doing.

Pam Barnhill [00:11:51]:
Now others of the methods are in between. You get people who are eclectic homeschoolers where they’re pulling a little bit from different methods, that was where we fell in with our uschoolers kind of thing. You have people who are doing project based learning, which is probably somewhere between a unit study and unschooling. Then you have people who are doing unit studies, which is more of a way of thinking about arranging the material than it is a pedagogy or anthropological look at who your children are. Though I will say that there are some benefits to learning together as a family that I think can really inform who your family becomes and the culture that you build in your family, and that can be built with unit studies. And so it is definitely one worth looking at. So what if you’re like, Pam, this is all interesting and fascinating, but I just don’t have time to read about all the things and do all the things. Go get the little cheat sheet I have for you and see if something there really sparks your interest and you want to dive deeper into 1 or the other.

Pam Barnhill [00:12:59]:
If you only have time to read one book though, my recommendation would be For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay. That book will get you thinking about children in a whole new way. Even though it’s based on the Charlotte Mason method of education, it really does just get you thinking at the very beginnings. It’s a very approachable book. It’s a very readable book. It’s from a Christian perspective, and I think it’s a fabulous way to dip your toes into these alternative methods of education. Another one that is an absolute favorite of mine is schooling our own by John Holt. That’s gonna give you a more unschooling approach.

Pam Barnhill [00:13:40]:
And then if you want to step a little bit further into the Charlotte Mason Classical world after you’ve read For the Children’s Sake, then I would recommend any of Karen Glass’s works. Okay. So that’s a good and maybe I’ve got you to thinking a little bit considering why you might want to do some approachable reading about different methods of homeschooling and different methods of education. But what are some of the drawbacks that come from these methods? And I think the biggest one is we get fixated on this idea that if we’re going to adhere to a method or if we’re going to follow a method that we’ve got to do everything that method says, whether or not it’s good for our family or not. And that’s where I think homeschooling methods can be detrimental to homeschoolers. Because at the end of the day, what you’re doing really needs to work for your family. And your family has to come first before any method that you might try to adhere to. So there is certainly value and worthiness in learning about these things, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to allow them to paint us into this little corner where we can’t look at or try anything else.

Pam Barnhill [00:14:54]:
The other detriment is I think sometimes homeschooling methods are just another way that homeschoolers can compare to one another and either feel less than because of that comparison or feel like they are better than because of that comparison. So when we put methods into their place and realize that they are just a tool, their ways for us to learn more about the world around us and their ways us to serve our children better, then there’s no reason for us to feel worse because of how we are adhering to a method or feel better than because of how we are adhering to a method. And then, I guess the ugly part, we’ve talked a little about the good, the bad, and now let’s do the ugly, is where I see moms really tie themselves up in knots because some guru or some expert has given them this piece of advice. And they’re using it to make themselves or to make their children miserable by trying to stick to a particular method. And I have to tell you, adherence to a method of homeschooling, it’s just not worth it to make your family absolutely miserable, to make yourself miserable. Instead, always on the side of doing what is best for you and doing what is best for your family. Look, I love a good homeschooling method book. I’d love to chat about methods of homeschooling with my friends.

Pam Barnhill [00:16:16]:
I think these were some absolutely fascinating conversations and great reads back in the day when I was learning how to homeschool my kids. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I don’t regret the time and effort that I spent looking at the different methods that are out there and how they’ve informed our whole school. Having said that, at the end of the day, as I figured it out way back when Olivia was about 6 years old, we are Uschoolers, and I encourage you to be the same. That’s our show for today. Be sure to follow, subscribe, and leave a review so you never miss out on the wonder of homeschooling better together. To stay connected and learn even more about the homeschooling better together resources and to join our free community, visit hsbtpodcast.com. Until next week, keep stepping out of the overwhelm and into the wonder.