A question parents ask

What does a good homeschool lesson look like?

The short answer

A good lesson feels like a conversation, not a class, and it follows four moves: greet, review progress, teach one thing, then listen. If you spend more time counseling than lecturing, you're probably doing it right.

The reasoning

Here are the four moves, in order.

First, greet. Open warmly for a minute or two, the way you would with anyone you like. Small talk is part of the lesson.

Second, review progress. Go over projects like a friendly manager. Are they on schedule? What got in the way? What did the block teach them?

Third, teach one thing. Take something that came up naturally and teach one basic through it. If nothing came up, skip it. Teach less than you want to, and ask before you tell.

Fourth, catch up and counsel. Give the last stretch to whatever is on your child's mind, and listen more than you speak.

Why this shape? Bloom's finding is that one-on-one teaching, with a check for understanding at each step, beats a classroom by a wide margin. The four moves put that into a routine you can repeat every day. Teaching a basic through something that came up, math through money or writing through a project, is how knowledge sticks. And a lesson that ends while it's still fun leaves a child who comes back.

The research behind it

Students tutored one on one, with checks for understanding before moving on, did better than about 98 percent of students taught in a regular class. Benjamin Bloom, "The 2 Sigma Problem," Educational Researcher 13, no. 6 (1984).
Teaching emotional skills raises academic achievement. Joseph Durlak and colleagues, meta-analysis of social and emotional learning (2011), as cited in Sui Learning.
Learning that takes effort lasts longer than learning that feels easy. Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick (2014), as cited in Sui Learning.
Knowledge learned apart from its use rarely transfers to real situations. John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid, "Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning," Educational Researcher 18, no. 1 (1989), as cited in Sui Learning.

Try this

Use this session checklist. 1. Greet and make small talk. 2. Review progress on projects, then the personal side. 3. Teach one basic, through something that came up. 4. Catch up and counsel.

Where this falls short

This is one family's way of structuring a session, not the only good one. The social and emotional learning research is about school programs, not this exact routine. Change the moves if they don't fit your child.

Also asked as

How long should a homeschool lesson be?
How do I structure one-on-one tutoring?
What does a day of homeschooling look like?

The ideas behind this answer

The four-move lesson
Every session is the same four moves: greet, review progress, teach one basic in context, then catch up and counsel.
Supply and demand: teach less
Teach less, so your words are worth more. Scarcity creates value; effort creates memory.
Basics in context
Teach the basics through what the child is already doing, one thing at a time, when it comes up.
Two Sigma: you are the advantage
One on one beats the classroom by two standard deviations. You are the advantage. Act like it.