Meeting your student where they are…what does this mean?
If you are new to homeschooling, and particularly if you are working with a gifted or struggling learner, you have probably heard the advice to meet your student where they are. But what does this mean in a practical sense, and how does it work?
In order to understand how to meet your student where they are, it is important to start with an acknowledgment of both developmental and academic progression. All growing and learning occurs on a continuum, and while the rate of movement along this continuum can vary significantly from child to child, the general consensus is that the order in which a child progresses through these stages will remain fairly consistent from child to child. For example, a child may not sit up, walk, or run until much later than his peers, but he will still sit up before he walks and walk before he runs. From a developmental standpoint, this developmental sequence is outlined in pediatric developmental milestones, and if your child regularly sees a pediatrician for well visits, the pediatrician will monitor your child’s progress along this developmental continuum at each visit and make recommendations as indicated if your child isn’t progressing as expected.
But how does one determine an educational progression in the homeschool setting? While one option is to study learning theories and research on learning progressions for all of the subjects you intend to teach to your student, the easiest and most practical way for most parents is through use of a homeschool curriculum. A math curriculum, for example, is designed to guide a student in a progression from little to no math knowledge through to high school graduation. The same is true of language arts curriculums, science curriculums, etc*. Even a parent who feels they are far from being an expert in these subjects can grasp the sequence of learning for each of these subjects by reviewing the curriculum and the order in which concepts are taught. And then meeting a child where they are simply means identifying where that child currently sits in the continuum of learning that subject and then progressing them through the continuum at their own pace.
Keep in mind, as was already pointed out, that not all children will progress through the learning continuum at the same rate. This means one child may finish a “year’s worth” of a subject in less than one year, whereas another may take two years to cover the same distance. What matters is that the child is moving forward in the continuum, not how quickly or slowly they are doing so. In fact, forcing a child to move too quickly and making accommodations for concepts they didn’t fully grasp will actually create more problems in the long run.
So what do you do if your student is not progressing at the rate the curriculum predicts? If your student is grasping the material more quickly, you can simply move them through the continuum faster, such as by allowing them to test out of chapters they already know or skip some repetitive or review based questions in order to move on to the next lesson. By contrast, if your student is struggling with grasping the material, take the opposite approach and spend more time completing each lesson. You can create additional practice problems or review questions on your own, supplement with questions from another curriculum, or work in real-life application activities to teach the concepts they are struggling with (more ideas for how to do this can be found on our Instagram and Facebook pages). Continue on the concept until your student fully grasps the material and is ready to progress.
So the next time you hear the advice to meet your student where they are, hopefully you will have a better grasp of what that means and how it plays out on a practical level. Homeschooling may feel overwhelming at times, but if you remind yourself that learning and development occur on a continuum that literally lasts a lifetime, you can teach any student at their own pace by simply identifying where they sit on the continuum and then progressing them forward at the pace most appropriate for them. And that is the true beauty of individualized homeschooling.
*Learning theory isn’t an exact science and there are many trains of thought when it comes to educational methods and sequences. At a practical level, this means that different curriculums will often teach concepts in a slightly different order, but overall this order is often more similar than it is different.