Today’s guest is someone of which I’m a huge fan, who lives as a role model for my future, who has hundreds of thousands of followers, and who has even been featured in commercials for GoDaddy. She’s Lyn Slater, the Accidental Icon. She has multiple degrees and lives in New York where she taught social work at Fordham University for 20 years. She’s a fashion icon, but what really sets her apart is her critical thinking. Throughout her academic work and teaching career, she balances creativity wi...
Jun 09, 2021•1 hr 14 min
Is university a rite of passage or merely a means to success? Or is there even more to it? Could college grow our young adult’s minds and hearts in addition to their thinking and practical skills? Dr. Adam Clark is a professor and theologian at Xavier University. He’s committed to the idea that 21st century theological education must equip and inspire students to live according to the St. Ignatius dictum, “Go forth, and set the world on fire.” During his tenure, Dr. Clark has received many disti...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr 2 min
The Enneagram can be a useful tool for understanding the different ways in which people perceive the world, but how can it apply to critical thinking? Leslie Hershberger has a unique blend of wisdom, practical training, and insight. She has worked with the three-centered Enneagram approach for over 20 years as a consultant, master teacher, coach, spiritual guide, facilitator, and mentor. She’s certified in The Narrative Tradition and in Enneagram in Business and has served on the board of the In...
May 26, 2021•1 hr
Homeschooling should be an option for everyone. That doesn’t sound like a controversial statement, and yet many of us struggle to make our homeschool right for us and our family. Maren Goerss and Angela Sizer are the dynamic duo behind Homeschool Unrefined, an inclusive and non-sectarian podcast and community all about keeping homeschool simple, real, and fun. These friends of more than 20 years carry a breezy chemistry that bleeds into every topic they touch. They are both former public school ...
May 19, 2021•52 min
Raising five kids during the internet era, everyone is dying to know what my thoughts on video games are! How many hours, how many minutes, how many days? Are they too violent? Is it okay if they love Minecraft? Will they lose all motivation to work? Let’s discuss all this and more! Ash Brandin (they/them) is a middle school teacher from Golden, Colorado. After researching the use of video games in classrooms, Ash found that there was very little research about how games compel people to play, a...
May 12, 2021•56 min
The podcast has been dark for a few months… and for a good reason! Julie just wrapped up writing her newest book (out February 2022). Now that it’s in the hands of publishers, she’s ready to get back to the business of podcasting. The theme for this season comes from the topic of the book: Critical thinking. Let’s peel back the layers and get a closer look at what it means to be a critical thinker. Dr. Diana Hill is a psychologist and podcaster with Off The Clock Psychologists. At the beginning ...
May 05, 2021•1 hr 8 min
Join Julie today as she talks with best-selling author and award-winning playwright Ken Ludwig. Together, they explore their shared enthusiasm for Shakespeare and how to bring the Bard to life for our children. Learn about memorizing soliloquies, examining Shakespeare’s language, and the details of how Shakespeare’s plays have been preserved for us to enjoy (it’s a great story!). You can download show notes for the podcast here: http://blog.bravewriter.com/category/podcasts/ Resources: Want help...
Dec 09, 2020•50 min
It’s a little thing: that one comment, the nudge in the acceptable direction, the calm and carefully-worded reminder. You had the right tone of voice, the best intentions, the least egregious expectation. And then your child flies off the handle anyway. The resistance, the tongue-lashing, the pushing past whatever small boundary you set—putting on shoes to go to Target, taking the bowl to the sink, not licking the jug of milk with his tongue, not making that scooching sound with his chair... Whe...
Nov 25, 2020•57 min
When you signed up for the task of homeschooling, you surely imagined what the ideal homeschooling life would look like. This is the life you are fighting for. In homeschool, the vision for natural learning is a powerful draw. It’s also worthy of fighting for that vision. But because it is not natural to many of us and we have this controlling memory of traditional school interfering with our new, fragile vision of what homeschool can be, we often wind up fighting about it more than for it. We’r...
Sep 23, 2020•48 min
The number one question I get is not how to prepare kids for college, or what you need to start homeschooling, or even about homeschooling at all — it’s about chores. Should kids be assigned chores, should they be rewarded, and how do we enforce them? While we’ve got our little ones home all day, we’ve got to keep our house running and sanitary. We’re not necessarily looking for a perfectly presentable home, but we are looking for order and a sense that yesterday’s mess will not impede today’s p...
Sep 16, 2020•57 min
How do parents ensure that homeschooling is challenging and rigorous enough for their kids to become smart, successful adults? Many parents are under the impression that rigor is the best version of learning. Education that is rigorous means students are learning more, so many see rigor as a measuring tool for how serious the institution is for learning. But is that really the case? Let’s deconstruct the notion of rigor and see if there is something easier to implement and more effective for lea...
Sep 02, 2020•55 min
I heard from a mom who wanted to know how to shed the fear that her children won’t be ready to enter the school system one day. She wanted to be able to put her kids in school at any given moment—next semester, next year, maybe high school, definitely college. So, let’s talk about the difference between being educated and schooled, being a learner and being a student. Are you worried that you may “ruin” your kids? They may love learning but they will have serious academic gaffes if you keep your...
Aug 19, 2020•39 min
Did you ever think of learning as training your brain chemistry? The goal of skill-building in learning is automaticity, fluency, ease of use. It’s as useful to the child learning to ride a bike as it is the teen learning to think critically. Becoming automatic looks just like ease, skill, or fluency. Think of what it’s like driving: You can sing along to the radio and think about the upcoming election simultaneously, all while changing lanes on a highway at 75 miles per hour. Driving is so auto...
Aug 12, 2020•1 hr 11 min
Are you one of those people that thinks you just aren’t inventive enough to imagine creative learning experiences? We tend to think of creativity as something in the arts or something that is crafted—maybe even cooking, woodworking, and gardening. There’s a belief that creativity is attached to the imagination, and when we hear that word we are immediately thrust into the world of storytelling. It’s hard to summon a different definition for creativity and imagination—but that’s just what we’re g...
Aug 05, 2020•1 hr 17 min
This episode addresses a specific question: What do I do about children who refuse to learn—children who balk, who throw fits, and who are consistently in a bad mood about their educations? How do we address this? What we need to do is step back from insistence and coercion and rediscover the joy of learning—whether that comes through interest or directed school subjects. I will offer you a strategy for how to recapture some of that connection and joy in learning, even in relation to academic su...
Jul 29, 2020•51 min
Ideally, homeschooling as a common interest should be enough to unite us and drive us forward to forge friendships with a variety of people and learn from a variety of cultures. It should, but for many, that’s not how it is. How do you create a healthy, diverse homeschool culture for your local group? What kinds of guidelines, policies, and practices help bridge difference within a homeschool group? Let’s talk about the answers to those questions, as well as why homeschooling became so siloed in...
Jul 22, 2020•53 min
I have been asked the same question repeatedly over the past 10 years: How do I know if I should get a divorce? And this question has a friend: I am getting a divorce, so what do I do about my children? These two questions presuppose a third question, a bigger question: What’s a healthy home life for children? That’s what we’re going to address, including your marriage, reasons to divorce, reasons not to, and how to salvage or support homeschooling in the midst of all of those dynamics. Even if ...
Jul 15, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Is it possible to work from home while doing homeschooling? This school year is different from any other. We are not going into it with the same sense of confidence or the same tools, resources, and experiences that we rely on to be good homeschoolers. Instead, we’re coming in with a lot of uncertainty amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This has caused parents to think about the fall in a new way, and in addition to the garden variety homeschooler who chose this lifestyle long ago, there’s a new crop...
Jul 01, 2020•52 min
Millions of families have been forced to educate at home due to the pandemic of COVID-19. Millions of families also educate their kids this way by choice. Whether you are the former or the latter, all are welcome here. In the midst of this pandemic, Harvard Magazine published an article titled “The Risks of Homeschooling,” and I certainly have some thoughts about this. These are my own personal views, and I may push some buttons or challenge some ideas that you have, but I mean to do that. When ...
May 06, 2020•47 min
Let’s address this global, unique moment where homeschooling is suddenly center-stage and millions of families are experiencing a lifestyle change that is in some ways similar and in some ways different than the choice many of us made to do this homeschooling project. The move from having kids in school to having their education thrust upon you is creating a serious amount of anxiety, confusion, and disruption to what was considered ordinary life. If that weren’t enough, parents who used to send...
Mar 23, 2020•39 min
Today’s question comes from an encounter I had at a homeschool conference several years ago. It echoed a feeling I’ve experienced myself in the homeschool space as both homeschooler and homeschool speaker/business owner. And then, as we ramped up to this new podcast season, and I asked for your current questions, the same wish resurfaced. See if you relate to this fundamental heart cry of so many of us. How do I find my people in the homeschool space? Why can’t being a “homeschooler” be common g...
Mar 11, 2020•57 min
What do you do when your child has no clear passion? When we exhaust the value of the planned learning model, and we pivot to our children’s passions — at least for a season — what do we do when our kids pick passions that look pointless? We say that our kids have no passions, but the truth is they will find things to do. It’s just you may not approve of what that is. It may not look like the education you feel you owe your kids. The truth is: no subject on the planet is isolated from school sub...
Feb 26, 2020•45 min
In this season of the podcast, my goal is to give you a chance to pause and consider ways to improve the experience of learning in your home and in your family by answering questions you’ve sent to me via Instagram, email, and through our customer help desk. One theme is clear as I glance through the list of growing topics: parenting! You want to know how to get your kids to cooperate with the plan or the lack of a plan, how to prepare them for their futures when they don’t seem to imagine life ...
Feb 19, 2020•46 min
Today’s question will likely feel very familiar to pretty much any parent: “What if you just don’t have the energy to do all the stuff? The magic-making, the planning, the execution of all the tasks? I know what needs to get done, but I just can’t get myself to do it all. Help.” I get it. There are seasons of life that make the ordinary tasks feel like bench pressing a truck. When you’re in a season like that, you can’t imagine ever getting out of it. So, to address this topic, let’s identify a ...
Feb 12, 2020•41 min
Our goal with this season is to focus on your questions, both the questions you’ve been asking Julie throughout this podcasting journey and the questions you haven’t asked yet. Instagram , Twitter , Facebook groups — wherever you have the opportunity to reach out, please send a message to Julie about what you’d like to learn during season six of Brave Writer. Today’s question: How do you balance your roles as a parent and a teacher? You can download show notes for the podcast here: http://blog.b...
Feb 05, 2020•34 min
Welcome back, Brave friends! We want to start this season with a big thank you to all of you for helping us achieve an incredible milestone: over one million downloads of the show! We couldn’t be more proud or more grateful. Our goal with this season is to focus on your questions, both the questions you’ve been asking Julie throughout this podcasting journey and the questions you haven’t asked yet. Instagram , Twitter , Facebook groups — wherever you have the opportunity to reach out, please sen...
Jan 29, 2020•42 min
We want to share some exciting news: Brave Writer just turned 20! To celebrate, we will have a slew of wonderful offers throughout the year. You will find all of these deals in our newsletter, which you can sign up for at this link . Our goal with this season is to focus on your questions, both the questions you’ve been asking Julie throughout this podcasting journey and the questions you haven’t asked yet. Instagram , Twitter , Facebook groups — wherever you have the opportunity to reach out, p...
Jan 22, 2020•42 min
Julie is getting ready to go down to Texas to present at the Wild + Free conference, so today we talk with someone who’s been getting Wild + Free since the inception of this beautiful gem of a community. Greta Eskridge is a go-getter creative entrepreneur with enough projects to keep a team busy! Greta runs a website, a blog, a podcast, is an avid Instagrammer, and has written for and spoken at nearly every Wild + Free Conference. On top of that, she is a second-generation homeschooler to four a...
Feb 11, 2019•49 min
We are so excited because it is the Book Birthday of Julie’s brand new book, The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life ! We’ve heard from a lot of brave homeschooling parents throughout this season of the show, and looking forward, we want to hear from more of you Brave Learners out there: How are you rethinking curiosity, online gaming, or the role of collaboration in your home school – and what does that look like in your unique family? We can change the conve...
Feb 05, 2019•26 min
Today we’re joined by five wonderful moms from the CO Springs Homeschool Mamas Group. So instead of focusing on just one question, we’ll tackle one from each of them, representing the wide variety of problems that every homeschooling parent has to tackle throughout their home education journey. You can download show notes for the podcast here: http://blog.bravewriter.com/category/podcasts/ Resources: Sign up for The Brave Learner Conference (July 19, 2019 in Cincinnati, OH): https://thebravelear...
Jan 28, 2019•1 hr 23 min
