Teaching strategies for parents and caregivers

In the last 6 months, the US homeschooling population has doubled. With 70% of students schooling remotely, a lot of parents and teachers have been taking more ownership over their child’s education. Some have found this to be incredibly joyful and others have found it enormously stressful and time-consuming. 

With the rise of online education, information is available to anyone everywhere. This means that the role of the teacher has changed considerably in the last 30 years. Rather than be like a library (where information is stored), the best teachers are facilitators (who help students find the information they’re looking for and nurture their curiosity). 

Parents and caregivers,  as the primary attachment figures (and key role models), are ideally suited to this new role of “facilitator of knowledge.” 

Here are a few strategies families can use to help kids with homework and engage children in learning all the time, whether they’re in school or homeschooling. 

First, some tools to help with homework (whether it’s homeschooling assignments or schoolwork): 

1. Inquiry: Rather than tell students what to do, it’s helpful to ask questions to help guide them to their own answers. For example, if they’re trying to solve a difficult math problem, you can ask “How do you think it’s done?”. “Do you know where to find this information?” The more you can encourage students to find their own answers, they more likely they will be to retain the information later.  Learn more about types of inquiry here. Inquiry can require a lot of patience and it’s important to really wait after you ask a question, give a big block of silence for students to think and time to respond. I often find parents and caregivers can shoot question after question at students like artillery fine. Try as best you can to learn to wait and be ok with the silence. Gently encourage the reflection process. Don’t worry, the wheels are turning! Also, reflective listening can be a great tool to add to inquiry. Try to repeat back to students what they say to see if you’ve understood. This will also help them feel heard. Furthermore, it will give them a chance to examine if what they think is accurate. Rather than say, “you’re wrong,” or “you’re right,” you can ask questions such as “is that true?”, “are you sure?,” “are you really really sure?”, “Is there anything else we can do to be extra sure?” You can even tell them that you know the answer, but you think it would be helpful for them to arrive at it on their own. Please do this authentically and not use it as a way to manipulate them as they’ll catch on very quickly. The approach you should use is to trust their intelligence and their process, not pretend that you don’t know to trick them into getting the answer, which could fuel self-doubt, frustration and teach them to manipulate others.  Give them space to be frustrated and take their time as that’s what really helps them build motivation to solve challenging problems. You can gently encourage them, saying “I know you can do it.” “You’ve got this!”

2. Student as teacher: It’s often believed that being able to teach a subject is the final level of mastery. It also greatly helps enrich understanding.  To apply this technique, try to see if your student can teach you the lesson instead of the other way around. This is a great life saver for teachers. When I was a teacher, I often didn’t know some of the subject material I was supposed to teach kids. Instead, I asked them to try to teach it to them drawing on the resources I had. You’ll be amazed at the resources your student finds when challenged to teach you material. You can also find opportunities for your student to teach younger kids subjects like math and reading.  

3. Learning with kids: This technique ties into student as teacher. If you’re unclear about the material, use resources available to you to learn along with your student. Almost any answer can be found nowadays on youtube or wikipedia. This will model great learning strategies for them and also help boost their confidence about not knowing the material. It’s ok not to know. In fact it’s great! 

4. Differentiating instruction: Students have different learning styles. Howard Gardner described 8 types of intelligence. And it can be helpful to see material from multiple points of view.   In marketing, we often try to show material from different angles to get a potential customer interested (a TV ad, facebook ad, flier, referral). Likewise, in education, you can present material from different angles (talk about it, do a project,  show it, sing it, draw it, try to solve a problem)

5. Modeling: One of the most important ways that students learn is through imitating their primary role models. If you exhibit a passion for learning, use tools at your disposal to learn new information, push through frustration, ask questions about what you’re learning, they will model this behavior. 

6. Personalizing Learning: a ridiculously magic trick for getting kids interested and helping them retain information is making information relevant to student’s interests. I used to tutor the SSAT to 7th grade kids and found that some kids were very quick to learn every vocab word when we put it in a sentence that related to flatulence:). Some will respond more to relating material to Harry Potter, soccer, animals or other subjects they’re interested in. 

7. Context: It’s incredibly frustrating for a student to be told to do something and not be told why, how it’s helpful or relevant to their life. Try as best you can to take time to explain to students why what they are doing might be important - or better yet, use inquiry! If you genuinely don’t know why it’s important, you might want to seriously question why you’re asking them to do this work. Would you want to do something that you didn’t enjoy, had no importance and wasn’t relevant to your life?

8. Relate concepts: Perhaps what you’re learning in science has something to do with an activity you did yesterday. Maybe what you’re learning in history relates to a part of the bedtime story you read last night or Uncle Joe’s life story. Try to relate concepts as much as possible to other areas so kids can see the connections and learn to form their own. Use inquiry here as well!

Other tools to encourage learning: 

Students are learning all the time, not just when we assign them homework. Here are some fun ways you can encourage learning outside the classroom. 

1. Read together or watch a documentary together: Read aloud to kids every night. Ask them questions about what they’re reading, pause to see if they can guess what happens next, have then guess new vocab works in context and relate it to their lives. 

2. Youtube tunnels: Ask kids what they’re interested in. Try to find the information on youtube or wikipedia, let that lead to another topic and another topic in a free flow internet search together where you’re trying to find new information together and talking about what you’ve learned.  

3. Do a passion project together: Work together on a project your kid is passionate about bringing in math, science, language arts and other topics to help them succeed. For example, if your student wants to put on a play they could write the play, study history to help develop characters, make costumes and write a budget. This will motivate them to learn subjects they didn’t normally enjoy (and/or see the purpose for them) in pursuit of a goal they’re excited about. I also encourage open-ended projects that don’t have a particular goal associated with them to encourage creativity:). I can be really fun to create these kinds of projects for your student based on topics they’re interested in or to let them choose the project and let them run with it - or a version where you help build the activities surrounding the goal. For parents and caregivers looking to go more in-depth with this, the Brave Learner is a great book to help parents figure out how to personalize lessons and create interesting curriculum for kids based around self-directed or parent-guided projects.

4. Let your student help with your work: You may be surprised by how interested your students are in your job. Let them help out one day. It used to be that kids learned by being apprentices. Many your student could learn some things and feel more connected to you by helping with your work. 

5. Let kids be bored: A lot of families are afraid for kids to be bored. They think that they need to entertain students all the time. Boredom is actually an incredibly important part of childhood development. It’s the feeling that forces students to discover on their own what interests them and drives their passion. Boredom is not only ok, it may be essential to healthy childhood development (and good for you too). Psychologists agree. Boredom is good for kids! Some more great writing on the benefits of boredom can be found here. 

6. Be patient and keep in mind that kids remember everything. One of the most interesting things I learned as a teacher is that children retain everything that they learn. So the work of a teacher is not so much assisting with helping kids memorize facts, but helping them retrieve them and apply them to daily life. You may find that something you told a student weeks ago suddenly pops up into the conversation. It’s common for a child not to be able to speak for the first 5 years of their life and then suddenly start delivering long monologues about every topic imaginable.

7. Let kids play: we often underestimate our children’s natural biological urge to learn and don’t give them enough time to explore on their own. We might even be scared that if we don’t structure their time, they won’t learn at all. It’s really important to give kids large, unstructured blocks where they can play outside, read, do legos, learn about birds or even do minecraft (which is more educational than you might imagine). If your child is expressing resistance to learning, it may be that you’re not giving them enough free time. If you’re skeptical about giving your kid large blocks of unstructured time (as you very well might be as it’s goes against almost everything we’re taught in our culture about how kids learn), I highly recommend Peter Gray’s groundbreaking book, “Free to Learn,” the film “Class Dismissed,” and Kerry Mcdonald’s new book, “Unschooled.”

Finally, here are some ways you can improve communication. 

So many families have told me recently that their kids won’t listen to them, much less do homework. Here are some simple ways you might be able to improve communication with kids. 

1. Take care of yourself. The absolutely most important thing you can do for your family is take care of yourself. Meditate, walk, take a break (even if it’s just one minute or 5 minutes). Even if you’re doing your best to hide it, your stress will be felt by your child and they will lash out and express resistance or model your behavior. If a behavior your child exhibits bothers you, try to take one moment to look inward, reflect on how this might be about something that’s going on with you or your inner child and give some love to the part of you that’s hurting. Even if you do this for 30 seconds before addressing the behavior, it can help a lot. 

2. Reflective listening. Children respond best when they feel understood. Before responding, try repeating back to a child what they’re expressing to you, how they say they’re feeling and verify you’ve got it right. It will calm them to feel understood and maybe help you get some important information that you’re missing. Then you can share how this makes you feel and ask them if they understand. This also models a great style of communication to them.

3. Give context. Nobody wants to do something just because. If your child doesn’t want to do homework, attend their zoom session or clean up the dishes, please take time to give them a logical explanation of why it’s important in the short or long-term for their well-being and the well-being of your family and community. If you can’t think of one, maybe you shouldn’t be asking them to do it in the first place.  

4. Spend quality time with your child. In these busy times, we sometimes don’t even get 5 minutes to just “be” with our child. This can be especially difficult in families with siblings and even more so when one of the children is an infant or toddler. Even if you can take 30 minutes to give one of your children the attention they need, this will make them much more responsive to you. On a higher level, this important bonding time where they’re engaged with you will enhance learning skills. Engagement with parents is one of the most important factors that contributes to children’s educational outcomes. 

5. Be patient. Sometimes your relationship won’t change over night. If you can give your child time after you ask a question, make a request, express how you feel this will go a long way. Sometimes if we don’t wait for things to happen over night, they can happen in a few days, but if we want them to change immediately, they won’t change for years. 

6. Get support. Parenting is hard and you shouldn’t have to do this alone. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to a friend, neighbor, therapist - or to us if you need a friendly ear. Your work is the most important work for our society. And since you cared enough to read this blog, I know you’re amazing at it. Your child is so very lucky to have someone in their life who cares so much.