Three Roles: Parent, Teacher and Coach
Reading time: 8 minutes
Your Three Roles
You have three primary roles in the homeschooling environment. Each role serves the others, to create the best learning experiences for your child. Note that when you use each of your roles, you need to use different skills sets, and that each has distinct purposes to serve learning.
Parent
Role – Guides, manages, leads, establishes structure, provides expertise, advice and feedback, focus on faith and character, etc. (this can be a very long list of things). This role is important as it establishes the structure and positive examples that support learning.
Teacher
Role – Creates knowledge, prepares, controls the environment, conveys information, explains, stimulates thinking, asks great questions, checks understanding, sets learning goals, runs the sessions in a productive way, motivates, focus on input/understanding, measurement and testing (and many other tasks). This role is important because it transfers information, creates knowledge, and provides a positive environment for learning.
Coach
Role – Helps, provides focus on the process of study, collaborates on and introduces the use of sound technique, monitors and measures study effectiveness. Helps the child reach their learning goals. Overcomes the illusion of learning, leads the efforts toward the goal of creating a Lifelong Learner (and other tasks). This role is important because it guides the effectiveness and efficiency of individual study, helps create important lifelong habits and skills, and prepares children for the rigors of higher education and the world of work.
The important concept is be fluent in each role and to know when to seamlessly shift from one role to another when the situation requires it.
Effective change requires the leadership provided by coaching. This is the missing component in many homeschooling environments. It is very hard to change by yourself — even when you are highly committed. If you really want to get better at something, you need a coach.
For studying and learning, what kind of coach do I need to be?
If you want your child to become an expert learner, you need to do the very same things that good coaches do for their clients.
As the “Parent Coach,” you fill an important gap to improving the process of learning for your child. Good classroom instruction is very important, of course, but smart student study techniques and habits are also vital.
Yes, you can learn to be a very skillful learning coach. We have all the tools to help you do it well.
You are your child’s best coach
Many of the modules in our online courses have a coaching component. When you take one of our online courses, you will get easy to use assessment tools, coaching tips, and discussion guides with behavioral learning points to make this role easy.
Learn from the very best practices of expert coaches. We have over 40 years of coaching experience to share with you.
Become the learning coach your child needs.
