Like many families, Ms. Brady of Oakland thought a pod would make her life easier. Instead, she had to create a limited liability company, manage payroll, develop a curriculum and clean up after six children. A few months after the pod got rolling, she began to worry about what and how the children were learning, so the group hired a consultant to help.

“It’s kind of exhausting,” Ms. Brady said.

But the group has found a rhythm, with the parents sharing in the chores and the children spending the bulk of their days outside. The pod even has a name, Los Amigos del Bosque. “Is it perfect, no? Nothing about this year is perfect,” Ms. Brady said. “But when I see pictures of these kids playing together outdoors and climbing trees and hugging each other, I feel like something is right.”

But a pod, even one with adorable cubbies and a cheerful teacher, is not the same thing as a school. It has no principal to handle disputes, no aides to assist in the classroom and no counselors to offer guidance. Parents, often with no education experience, select the teachers, set the curriculum and choose the classmates. When problems emerge, they’re the ones making decisions about other people’s children.

“What’s happening in the micro-schools is we don’t have a network for our teachers to say, ‘What do you do when so-and-so decides they don’t want to put their shoes on?’” said Emma Emmerich, the director of Emerging Sprouts Forest School in Berkeley, Calif., who has been consulting for learning pods, including Ms. Brady’s. “A lot of parents have expectations, but they’re not educators, they don’t have the same lens to use to say that’s actually a

Continue reading – Article source

Posts from the same category:

    None Found

Also, don’t miss the following posts: