Home schooling is understandably placing a lot of strain on parents and families. One of the parent WhatsApp groups that I am on for my son’s school regularly has comments about frustration with home schooling, often involving feelings of being overwhelmed, not coping, and wanting to give up (from parents and children). This will naturally vary from family to family, but any household where parents are simultaneously juggling full-time work and teaching their children, will inevitably result in increased stress levels of everyone involved. The stress is exacerbated when children have high support needs, for instance, when they are young or have learning difficulties.

However, as we work through the difficulties of home-schooling, it may be helpful to reflect on the silver-linings that may be present, even if we might only be able to appreciate them in retrospect. For many, home-schooling is a chance to develop a much better understanding of the learning level and needs of our children. Pre-covid, when we sent our children off to school each day, it was much more difficult to ascertain what they understood or where they might need a little bit of extra help. In fact, it was much more difficult to find out what they were learning at school, and whether that work was too easy or hard or boring. Home-schooling provides a tremendous opportunity for parents to get to know our children better, how they learn, and the curriculum.

Home-schooling has meant that many children and young adults have needed to become more independent learners. While schools are making concerted efforts to provide a remote or online curriculum for students, the teacher is no longer there with students in the classroom, and the onus is more on our children to self-regulate their learning. While this can be frustrating when it doesn’t work or when children are struggling, the anecdotal impression from many parents is that children are developing the abilities to be more autonomous and to self-manage their learning. Correspondingly, teachers are necessarily shifting their teaching approaches to enable students to be more independent learners. It is possible that these shifts – where students take more responsibility for their learning and teachers setup learning environments where students can more easily assume that responsibility – may have long term benefits.

Additionally, home-schooling has meant that children (and parents!) are developing their digital learning capabilities. Scanning, uploading, editing, searching, and creating using technology may have been overwhelming weeks or even days ago, but is now becoming commonplace and second nature for many. Teachers too are learning how to better design tasks for online learning, so that tasks are clearer, resources easier to work with, and technology is used to facilitate interaction. Many teachers are learning how to teach effectively via web-conferencing (e.g. Zoom), providing the real-time instruction, feedback and sense of connection that is so important in schooling. The evolution of teacher capabilities from preparing printed worksheets at the beginning of lockdown 1.0, to utilising asynchronous online learning platforms to disseminate resources (e.g. Google Classroom), to now venturing into realtime collaboration using synchronous technologies, largely mirrors the evolution of the educational technology field, though in a remarkably compressed timeframe. It sets up our children and teachers for increased innovation in learning and teaching, once the pandemic abates.

So there’s no doubt that this has been a tough time for many, and nobody is claiming that is about to get easy any time soon. However, in retrospect, it is possible that we may really value and benefit from this lockdown time, where we got to know our children better, where they became more self-empowered learners, and where we all developed our digital learning capabilities. Many thanks to the efforts of teachers right across Australia. And hang in there parents – we can do this, together.