This is a really great question and one that I've heard a number of times. As a person who has worked in a private school, a public school, and as a homeschool mom as well as has a daughter who's actually a teacher, I come at this from a number of different angles. So I realize I'm not coming here with a particular bias because I've been in all these different environments.

A college degree of any kind, in my opinion, is not absolutely necessary to homeschool. Teaching is a skill that does need to be learned, but it can be learned by reading books at the library on classroom management, by reading books at the library on how to teach, by observing people online who are teaching things, whether it's someone teaching you how to fix a car, how to paint your house, how to do a particular kind of craft, how to bake bread. These people are all teaching you a skill. The main thing that you need to be able to do as a teacher is break down the topic into manageable pieces, starting easy and building to more difficult and finally to mastery.

In teaching, you need to be able when your child has a question, to listen to what they ask and understand, if anything, on the topic. Take that piece that they understand and show them what the next piece is. You need to be patient. You need to be willing to repeat yourself. You need to be willing to try to rethink a different way. You may have a set way that you know how to do something, but if your child is not learning that well, try to go at it from a different direction. That is the key to teaching at its core.

Understanding different teaching styles and building those into your homeschool. 

So you have your visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. Make sure that you are incorporating all these different things into learning. Have your child move things around, particularly if they're younger. Have them draw pictures, have them draw diagrams, have them write something in outline form. Don't just let them type. They need to actually physically write. There's lots of research that shows that your brain learns better when your hands are doing something, not just striking keys. I think that is one of the big reasons why a lot of people are not learning things. 

With that being said, make sure that they are using their hands, whether you're using play dough, doing it together, watching a video together and learning side by side, trying to figure something out together, or you're pretending like you don't understand and say, "Okay, now what's the next thing that we should do here? What do we see?" Whether you're building a puzzle, breaking apart a word, counting things, doing a hidden picture, all of these things help your child to learn, and you need to approach it differently when they're little than as they get older. As they get older, you can bring in more resources like online videos, tutors, professionals, you know, hiring somebody if that's available to you, or just using YouTube videos if that's what you have to do to introduce a topic, going to the library and doing research together to learn a task together. All of these show the value and the importance of learning, and all of these you don't need a college degree for.

In fact, in college, a lot of what people often learn is what I call cramming and jamming. They go in, they memorize something before a task, they do the minimum that they can do to try to get a paper, get it turned on time. They didn't learn how to learn. As a homeschooling teacher, you're actually teaching in a very different way than what you did if you went to college. If you did not go to college at all, again, you're not out there. What is a skill you have learned how to do? What is something that you've practiced? Maybe it's learning how to homeschool. The main thing that you need to focus on is learning how to learn and teaching your kids how to learn. There'll be lots of resources on Decision Tree. There's resources online. There's a great homeschooling curriculum. We'll be presenting a workshop, an online course that's going to be very affordably priced for parents to learn. That will be released later this fall of 2024. If you'd like to know about that, sign up in the newsletter, but it is not necessary to have a degree or to have a teaching degree to be an excellent homeschooler. Many people are actually intimidated by that. In some of my research, I found that the vast majority of people interested in homeschooling who did have a degree, their worry was that they were not teachers. They didn't feel like they were qualified to do it since their degree was not in teaching, and that's not the case.