FREE Evaluation Tool for Intentional Living, Unschooling, and Homeschooling!

I know what you're thinking:

"Why is a radical unschooler offering an evaluation tool?"

"Unschoolers don't believe in testing."

"Unschooling doesn't have assess-able standard benchmarks."

"Unschoolers see testing as a regurgitation of memorization, and believe both are useless."

"Tests don't measure learning."

True for some, not for all.

While it is true that many unschooling families choose never to test their children's performance of academics, there are actually many reasons an unschooling family might choose to evaluate any number of experiences. 

Many of us are bound by laws requiring us to prove academic progress annually or every few years, which can be accomplished through testing, portfolio building, or verbal evaluation. Learning to think in terms and evaluator might use can be very helpful during this process. Homeschoolers often call this jargon "education-ese," and anyone can learn to speak the language necessary to communicate with the system. I highly encourage you to do so.

Many unschoolers, and homeschoolers as well, also practice intentional living- for many of us that is what led us to alternative forms of education for our families. Of course, any time you have intentions or goals, you must evaluate whether you are living up to them so that you can make the choice to continue with your actions and goals of change them if they aren't getting you where you want to go.

Intentional living is ALL about evaluation.

Many homeschoolers, and most unschoolers, practice consensual education, meaning they definitely believe there are certain skills children must learn and knowledge children must acquire to become functional and successful people, and they facilitate education in ways that their children agree to learning these subjects and skills. This education is a goal like any other, and as such requires regular evaluation.

Learning how to evaluate progress toward a goal is itself a goal able to be evaluated.

Like any skill, evaluation is a skill best learned through modeling by someone who is kind AND does it well, and involvement in the process.

If this is not a skill you currently possess, please know learning how to evaluate progress toward a goal alongside your children is a fabulous way for parents and mentors to to model lifelong learning and evaluation at the same time, it shows them your humanity, and allows them to believe that knowing everything is not the goal.

I highly recommend you involve your children as deeply as their development will allow them to participate in the whole process- from considering and choosing values and goals to planning how to achieve them and evaluating how well the plans, behaviors, and actions lead to your chosen destination.

(Side note:If you need help with the whole intentional living process, may I recommend enjoying my course: Deschooling with Direction: Essential Skills for Intentional Adventures in Living and Education for Unschoolers, Homeschoolers, and Intentional Families? It's a gentle and simple introduction to the foundational skills of intentional living, and I will be launching it very soon, so go get on the waitlist!)

What can we evaluate on our journeys of intentional living, respectful parenting, homeschooling, and unschooling?

You can evaluate whether your choice of learning materials and activities led to a retained knowledge of a subject.

You can evaluate how well you lived by your values in a specific situation- such as holidays with extended family and friends or other places where we might not agree with the values of the group we find ourselves in.

You can evaluate how any situation made you feel or helped you learn (or not).

Most evaluation is for the purpose of deciding whether to replicate the experience / continue with your plans or to avoid / change certain situations or change your plans. Or even change the goal itself.

Self-evaluation is a skill necessary to knowing and believing in your own worth.

If you cannot think critically to create your own opinion of yourself you will be reliant on the opinions of others, who might not have similar values or believe your goals or experiences have any worth, not to mention the fact that their opinions can be skewed by things beyond honest evaluation of skills, progress, and self.

It is far better for children to learn the skills of evaluation at home, or at least with loving adults, than any other educational setting for the same reason. Institutional schooling and most employment opportunities have their own goals and standards for everyone, and do not take into account the values and goals of the individual, so we definitely don't want our children relying on the opinions of any standardizing system to form their own deep beliefs of self-worth- except perhaps in the minuscule chance that the standards of the institution genuinely match our own and our children's. Never being able to live up to the standards of a system can cause much shame if those are the standards that seem most important to the people whose esteem you desire. Contrariwise, performing above the expectations can cause great pride in things that don't matter which always leads to pain when one finds out the true value of that performance. 

When evaluation is performed in a group of caring individuals, such as a family, emphasis can be kept on the values of the family or individual. When something doesn't go well, we can remind each other of our strengths, and when things go great, we can remind each other of challenges to avoid ego issues. We can learn to think critically about every action, behavior, and goal without shame, safely wrapped in love and support. 

Evaluation is a skill integral to intentional living, to processing our feelings and experiences, which facilitates all kinds of learning about ourselves and others. We can learn about motivations, causes and effects, challenges and strengths. We can learn how to create environments that help us and how to remove or mitigate environmental hindrances. 

Through evaluation, we learn our own personal recipes for success and how to handle failure. 

We learn what experiences we love and how to replicate them, as well as what experiences we would be happier avoiding, including how to handle it and recover if we can't.

Is evaluation a skill you possess? Do you practice it regularly?

If not, I have a FREE GIFT for you!

I compiled a bunch of journal prompts / conversation starters to help you learn how to evaluate any experience, and you can get it here: Evaluation Tool for Intentional Living, Unschooling, and Homeschooling. Its also available in my Freesource Library if you already have access to that.