Based Learning 8: HBL — Home-Based Learning

HBL: Home-Based Learning

This is learning from home rather than at a campus where you attend classes. It gives you the flexibility to fit study around your other commitments including family, work or recreational activities. Home-based learning doesn’t need to be like school; instead, it can be a continuation of how your family lived before your children became “school age.”

How HBL Works:

1. Educator’s role is to be “the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.”
2. Home Educators can use the time with their children to work out family dynamics and relationships, and each child’s goals and dreams.
3. Embracing home-based learning doesn’t mean never being able to step foot in a class or other group learning setting. Home is merely the base; the community and the world are where much of the learning occurs.
4. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn’t a school at all.

Home Educators Groups:

1. Those who are motivated by religious and moral reasons;
2. Those who have philosophical or pedagogical reasons;
3. Those who turn to home education because of problems their children experience in school, both academic and social.

Benefits and HBL Categories:

1. Alternatives to School: Provides an opportunity for students to experience an alternative form of teaching and learning with the use of technology. Lesson packages are prepared by teachers and then uploaded online for the students to access from home.
2. Home Schooling: Also known as home education, is the education of children inside the home, as opposed to in the formal settings of a public or private school. Home education is usually conducted by a parent or tutor. Many families that start out with a formal school structure at home often switch to less formal and, often, more effective ways of imparting education outside of school
3. Natural Learning: Also known as unschooling, refers to a type of learning-on-demand where children pursue knowledge based on their interests and parents take an active part in facilitating activities and experiences conducive to learning but do not rely heavily on textbooks or spend much time “teaching”, looking instead for “learning moments” throughout their daily activities. Parents see their role as that of affirming through positive feedback and modeling the necessary skills and the child’s role as being responsible for asking and learning.
4. Autonomous Learning: A school of education which sees learners as individuals who can and should be autonomous i.e. be responsible for their own learning climate. Autonomous education helps students develop their self-consciousness, vision, practicality, and freedom of discussion. These attributes serve to aid the student in his/her independent learning.
5. Self-Directed Learning: Easy to initiate, because your primary mission is to create a happy home-base from which your children can explore and learn about their family, community, and the world. You don’t need to be a master teacher in all your children’s subjects, nor some sort of “super parent.”
6. Flexibility in Learning: A timetable is unnecessary. Lessons can be as short or as long as necessary. If a child is not learning for some reason, because she’s tired, can’t concentrate or is simply having an off day, the parent doesn’t have to persist. The lesson can be dropped and picked up later. Conversely, if a child becomes absorbed, the lesson or activity can go on for as long as the interest lasts, for hours, days or longer.
7. Track of Progress in learning: Reliance on exercises and testing as evidence of learning is unnecessary at home simply because learning is highly interactive. This means that parents know exactly where their children are at.
8. Informal Learning: When children learn informally, they seem to impose their own sequence on what they learn. Curriculum logic and child logic do not equate. Child logic is individual and determined by the complex and dynamic interplay between the child’s existing level of knowledge and incoming information, mediated by interest, motivation, curiosity or desire to take on a challenge.
9. Conversational learning: Any social conversation, if a topic comes up about which one person knows more than the other, it’s likely that one will learn from the other. It’s a natural part of the conversation for one person to explain something to someone else. This is not “teaching” in the usual sense. It’s simply facilitating the normal flow of talk, offering knowledge and responding to questions.
10. Teacher-Directed Learning: Education in the Learning Partnership is truly a collaborative effort between the home and the school, combining the strengths of parent-student, student-teacher, and parent-teacher interaction. The degree to which parents are engaged in learning partnerships varies with the age of the student, the learning needs, and the grade level.

The Home-Based Educational Support Program assists Schools:

1. In the provision of the educational program being provided for the student;
2. To maintain ongoing relationships with enrolled students with severe disabilities and fragile health and their families;
3. To foster the student’s engagement with school and to plan and implement their transition back to school.

Resources to Implement HBL:

1. Edmodo: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/based-learning-8-hbl-home-based-learning--386271/
2. 10 Ways to Be a Better Learner: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/10-ways-to-be-a-better-learner--386233/
3. 15 Ways of the Successful Self-Directed Learner:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/15-ways-of-the-successful-self-directed-learner--386235/
4. 25 Free Online Resources and Web Apps for Lifelong Learners:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/25-free-online-resources-and-web-apps-for-lifelong-learners--386237/
5. Online Courses: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/online-courses--382981/
6. Online Curriculum for Children:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/online-curriculum-for-children--384013/
7. Top 5 Websites For Free Online Education:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/top-5-websites-for-free-online-education--384785/
8. Ultimate List of Educational Websites:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/ultimate-list-of-educational-websites--384827/