Bringing Homeschool Strategies to Public School Classrooms to Help Meet the Special Educational Needs of Students

This presentation will present a brief overview of data from a study of homeschooling families. A specific focus of this study was understanding how the change from a public-school classroom to a homeschool learning environment affected children with special educational needs (SEN). The results of the study indicated that 50.8% of participating families had a child who attended public or private school before the family decided to homeschool. For this group of families that had a child who attended public or private school before homeschooling, 60.6% reported having a child with SEN. This was a significant difference compared to the group that had always homeschooled where 43.4% reported having a child with SEN. Parents’ perceptions about how the change in learning environments affected their child will be shared. The researcher and presenter is a professor of educational research and a former homeschool mother whose homeschooled son is now a public-school teacher. Findings from the study will be discussed in relation to classroom observations of this homeschooled public-school teacher’s practice using homeschool strategies