Education

Our Homeschool Microschool Goes Operational


As we set out to homeschool our daughters in a pod of families who, like us, would prioritize minimizing their potential exposure to COVID-19, with a teacher to help guide the learning, a daunting reality set in slowly.

As Josh Shirazi, one parent in our pod, said, we—and my wife in particular—would be taking on the roles of head of school, director of admissions, facilities manager, and, we would come to learn, director of curriculum.

Questions that at one point had been limited to the domain of my writing and advising would now become a central part of our life—and the core operations of our household.

But at a higher level, many of the questions we would be asking weren’t all that different from what parents and communities ought to be asking about their children’s education even in more normal times.

With Whom Do I Want My Children To Learn

Nationwide there were significant questions around equity as pods formed. Would they exclude or preclude low-income students thanks to the economics of hiring teachers or tutors? Would they be homogenous groups that would reinforce existing social capital structures? Countless articles appeared on the topic in the mainstream media. We agreed with the points they raised.

Added to that were questions around social contracts and safety, let alone logistics and responsibilities. Inherent in being a parent is the responsibility of keeping your children safe and having uncomfortable conversations. But COVID takes those questions—and their intrusiveness—to a whole new level. What did safety mean? Were families being strict not just with who they saw, but with whom those people in turn saw as well? Families podding together would need to be comfortable spelling that out in brutally transparent detail. Throughout the summer and early fall we watched many pods form quickly only to disband mere days or weeks later.

Piecing the group together wasn’t easy for us either. We started with our closest friends in our town and their two children—one who was a rising first grader and the other who was roughly three years younger. We had compatible lifestyles and shared values. They also lived with their children’s nanny—who we had always admired for her care for their children—and her three-year-old son, who balanced out the ages and gender diversity of the group.

We soon joined with a fourth family—the one that had sparked the idea of the pod in the first place—as they had one daughter who was a rising first grader and another a couple years younger. With medical concerns in their family, we knew they would help us draw hard lines in the sand around what behaviors were acceptable. This was a positive in our mind as we recalled the advice of my mentor Clay Christensen, who wrote, “It’s easier to hold our principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time.”

More challenging than navigating a social contract around our behaviors were the questions around how to launch the school.

Facilitating The Pod

With a group of seven children, ranging in ages from three to six, key to making the dynamic work was having an educational philosophy—and a teacher—which could thrive in a multi-age learning environment.

A multi-age environment was something we desired strongly for our girls. As Sal Khan wrote in his book, “The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined”:

“To state what should be obvious, there is nothing natural about segregating kids by age. That isn’t how families work; it isn’t what the world looks like; and it runs counter to the way that kids have learned and socialized for most of human history. … As anyone who’s ever spent time around children can tell you, both younger and older kids benefit when different ages mix. The older ones take responsibility for the younger ones. … The younger ones look up to and emulate the older ones.”

We had already seen these benefits. Such a setup would also reinforce that there is something to learn from everyone, regardless of age.

There are several ways to facilitate a wide-range of ages—from innovative blended-learning models like those in use at microschools like the Acton Academy to Montessori education. Given the ages of the children, that the learning would be outdoors, and our girls’ familiarity with and love for Montessori, our instinct was to look for a creative Montessori teacher who could modify the philosophy for the outdoor environment and adapt to a limited budget and do-it-yourself mentality. Easier said than done, but we were hopeful given the number of families that successfully create a range of at-home Montessori experiences (see here and here, for example).

Although I was personally excited about taking pages from the Acton Academy playbook and my 15 years of working in education technology, my wife and I knew we could use technology with our children on our own time with them to allow them to further pursue interests sparked from the books they read and learn to type and code. Key to our decision-making process was to remember that learning doesn’t stop when “school” is over—and to view our daughters’ education more holistically.

As Matt Bowman, founder and CEO of MyTechHigh, wrote me, “Remember that learning happens inside learners (not buildings).”

This is relatively easier to see when you have a front-row seat and decision-making role in your children’s school-like experience, but it’s something worth remembering for all parents as we make tradeoffs in our children’s schooling.

As we searched for a capable teacher, I also had the sense it would be easier to find a trained Montessori teacher than one versed in creating the culture of an Acton-like environment. And the benefits of some of the Montessori materials is that they can aid children in learning themselves because of their self-correcting nature, which would make the success of the school less teacher dependent over time if a teacher and parents created the right routines and priorities up-front.

With those parameters in mind, we searched for and found a teacher in relatively short order—speed was important to us, for better or worse—and we were off to the races in setting up our home environment, the topic for my next piece.





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