How to Write a Homeschool Mission Statement (And Why You Should)
It’s easy to get so caught up in your everyday to-learn lists that you lose sight of the bigger picture of what you want your homeschool life to feel like — but a mission statement can help you set a purpose so that your homeschool feels deliberate and successful.
A clear mission statement is what gives your homeschool focus, says Lillian Ahern, a life coach and homeschool mom. “Your mission statement is what helps keep you on track, helps you choose between Option A and Option B, helps you stay in touch with the values that matter to you, and helps you set goals and celebrate success,” say Ahern. “It’s one of those crucial things that we often don’t realize we need.”
A mission statement does three great things for your homeschool:
A mission statement gives you focus. With so many options — for curriculum and classes and activities and philosophies — how do you choose? If you have a mission statement, you choose the options that best line up with what's important to you. If family time is important, you might not want to sign up for every single activity so that you have plenty of downtime together at home.
A mission statement prepares you for problems. Sadly, it can't eliminate all your homeschool problems, but it can help you see them coming so they don't knock you over one Monday morning. For instance, if preparing your kids for college is a goal and you know you don't want to teach high school math, you have plenty of time to figure out a way to deal with high school math that doesn't involve you teaching it.
A mission statement gives you metrics for success. One of the biggest challenges for homeschoolers is knowing whether we are doing a good job — are our kids learning what they need to? And what standard do we use to determine that anyway? A mission statement gives us our own standard of measurement, and we can evaluate each year in terms of how successful we were at living up to our mission.
So how do you write a homeschool mission statement? If you've never written a mission statement, it's surprisingly straightforward — no corporate lingo required. Instead, think about three big questions: What will your homeschool do? How will you do it? What will be the end result? After you've spent some time brainstorming in your preferred way — whether that's journaling, mood board making, or just talking it through with a friend — identify two values and one big-picture goal for your homeschool.
Values are the things that are important for your family — the ideas that you want your homeschool to support and reinforce. When we started homeschooling, we were pulling our daughter out of traditional school, so my values ended up being reactions to things that I didn't like about our life with her in school: 1, I wanted my kids to develop a deep love of learning and the confidence in their abilities that goes with that, and 2, I wanted our family life to anchor our days. Your values may be reactive, too — they may point to something happening in your life that you want to change — but they can also be proactive, envisioning future possibilities. Your values may include things like giving your kids a diverse and inclusive education that isn't whitewashed, or showing them the world through travel and learning, or nurturing their creative spirits. Every family's values will look a little different — that's one of the great things about homeschooling, being able to take those individual values and use them as a cornerstone in building your child's education. As you think, you'll probably come up with way more than just two values, so one of the challenges of writing a mission statement is honing in your focus to the two that best reflect what is important to you. Focusing in on just two values gives you a clear picture of your homeschool priorities — if you try to make everything a priority, you'll end up with perpetually scattered priorities. (Don't let this scare you: Lots of times, you'll recognize that many of your priorities can fall under the umbrella of one bigger value.)
In addition to values, you need a goal — something your homeschool is working toward. For us, that goal was always to prepare my kids so that they had all their options open for whatever they wanted to do next. (I didn't go into homeschooling expecting that we'd keep doing it all the way through high school, even though that's how it turned out!) Your goal might be to prepare your kids for college, or to meet your state's academic standards every year, or to empower them to start a business, or to give them the tools they need to build whatever future they imagine, or to enjoy their childhoods without worrying about the future. Just as with values, your goal is likely to be unique to your family — and you may have a big goal that carries you all the way through high school or a smaller goal that's focused on getting you through the next six months. Either way is totally okay, as long as it reflects what's really important to you for your homeschool.
To turn your values and goal into a mission statement, all you have to do is combine them into a sentence. It doesn't have to be a fancy sentence — in fact, when it comes to mission statements, simpler is better. (Our is just “I want our homeschool to instill my kids with love and confidence for learning and to put our family life first, so that my kids are emotionally and academically prepared for whatever they want to do next.”) Do take the time to write it down, though — preferably in your own handwriting because there's something weirdly empowering about the physical act of writing out a mission statement. Write yours on a fresh sheet of paper in your best handwriting, and see if it doesn't make you feel a little more confident about homeschooling.
