The Educating Parent (merging Beverley Paine's Homeschool Australia and Unschool Australia)

Tips for Home Educators

Tip 7: Try creating a Learning Group with other homeschool kids. Lots of times kids can explain things to each other better than an adult can explain it to them.

Cooperative Learning is fundamental to many traditional classrooms. Research has overwhelmingly demonstrated its effectiveness. However, the very nature of homeschooling makes Cooperative Education a challenge to implement: unless you have triplets, your student has no one to form a group with at home.

First, let's quickly describe Cooperative Learning: students work in groups (typically 2 - 4 members) to complete group tasks. Group members should not be working competitively. The goal is to establish "positive interdependence". Students learning cooperatively capitalize on one another's resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another's ideas, monitoring one another's work, etc). The educator's role is to determine the group's task, then facilitate group interaction (including the group's development of social skills). Each group member must have a role to play towards completion of the group's task (each member has assigned responsibilities, such as scribe, or researcher, or artist). And the task is not completed successfully unless each member can, on completion, explain the results (the educator can pick a member at random and ask them to explain the groups work). The group's success is not based upon the correct answer. The group's success is based upon the randomly chosen member's ability to explain the group's results. Usually verbal rewards for successful completion of a task are sufficiently motivating.

So, how can homeschoolers utilize this learning strategy? Well, of course you could find students that live near you and get together once a week. But we live in a digital age, and there is a digital solution. Web Conferencing allows groups to get together over the internet, and see each other, hear each other, see each other's computer screens. Some charge for use of the platform ( www.GoToMeeting.com ; www.WebEx.com ; www.livemeetingplace.com ). Others are free, or inexpensive, but typically less robust ( www.yugma.com ; www.zoho.com ; www.vyew.com ).

My website offers Group Lessons, and we use Cooperative Learning strategies ( www.MasterMath.info ). You can see a recorded Group Lesson by clicking on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iVmP7saNu8 .

See the entire series of Tips at the http://stan0403.edublogs.org/ , or at www.MasterMath.info .

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Beverley Paine with her children, and their home educated children, relaxing at home.

Together with the support of my family, my aim is to help parents educate their children in stress-free, nurturing environments. In addition to building and maintaing this website, I continue to create and manage local and national home educating networks, help to organise conferences and camps, as well as write for, edit and produce newsletters, resource directories and magazines. I am an active supporter of national, state, regional and local home education groups.