TIP #6: The teacher is not the main focus - Beginner Guide to Charlotte Mason

When sitting in a mainstream school classroom, children are used to the teacher standing upfront and being centre-stage. The teacher presents the lesson, explains all the information they need to know, re-explains it in different ways if children don't understand and needs to make sure that they keep the children's attention. So they need to be engaging and sometimes even entertaining! 

Even in a homeschool setting, the parent often feels like they need to play centre-stage and everything the child learns needs to be filtered through the parent and presented in some easy-to-understand package. 

Charlotte Mason disagreed with this view. She felt that the teacher or parent should fade more into the background and act as a scaffolding, a support structure for the child. Ensure the child is provided with all the information they need and be available to help and guide, but otherwise allow the text (in other words the book, lesson or object being studied) and the child to be the main focus.

How does this work in practice? Let's say a child has read a passage in a book and the parent asks them to narrate, but the child doesn't quite understand what the author is trying to say. The usual thing to do would be for the child to ask the parent to explain and the parent immediately explains the passage and they move on. However with this method, the child didn't really need to do any real work to figure out the meaning of the passage, it was just given to them. They are also assuming that the parent's interpretation of the passage was correct.

A better way to do this is for the parent to make sure they explain any difficult or key words from the passage ahead of time to the child and write these on a board. And also make sure the child understands what happened before and provide any additional context for the passage. When the child then encounters a part of the text they don't quite understand, you can point them to the key words to assist and if they still don't understand, you direct them back to the text, asking them to re-read certain parts of the passage slower this time to try to work out what the author is saying. Then the parent can ask the child what they think the meaning of the passage is and regardless what the child answers, their interpretation is not seen as wrong or right. It can be accepted as the child's response to the text.

This method takes the focus away from assuming the teacher or parent is always right, and gives the child the freedom to interpret and respond to books and lessons in their own way without the fear of being right or wrong. It also teaches the child the valuable lesson of how to look up and find information for themselves.