TPP 169: Colleen Kessler and Homeschooling Gifted Children
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
38 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 5 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What inspired Colleen Kessler to start homeschooling her gifted children?
I would say to those parents just starting out, first take a break. Then figure out what your kids are amazing at and add that subject back in. And then add another subject that they're pretty good at. And keep adding in until they're so confident in their learning that you can start to bring up the things with which they struggled by virtue of kind of a backdoor approach through their strengths.
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Reber, and I am really excited to share this episode with you. If you have a gifted or a two-week child that maybe you're homeschooling or maybe you're considering homeschooling, you may already know about my guest, Colleen Kessler. Colleen is a mom, a teacher, an author, a speaker, and the founder of the website Raising Lifelong Learners. She taught elementary gifted kids for more than a decade and has homeschooled her own gifted children. Colleen has written a lot of books for homeschooling families. She hosts the Raising Lifelong Learners podcast.
And she also has some virtual courses for parents, including a new one that she's going to tell us a little bit about called a crash course for homeschooling that kid. I think we know who that kid is. It's my kid. It's probably many of your kids as well. So as you'll hear from this conversation, Colleen and I, we really just scratched the surface. So I will definitely have her back on the show. But for today, we cover a lot of ground, including how to get started setting up your homeschool, what are some of the special considerations, what it actually might look like, and just some questions to consider if you are considering going down this route. I hope you enjoy our conversation. All right, and now without further ado, here is my conversation with Colleen.
Hey, Colleen, welcome to the podcast. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Hey, you're someone that before I started chilled parenting, I was reading your blog and keeping up with you because I was parenting and homeschooling a differently wired little guy. And so I think your resources are great. And I feel like this conversation is long overdue. So thank you for joining us today.
Oh, thanks for saying that. It was fun to discover Tilt when you first started. So I felt the same way, you know, that this kind of synergy that we have going and that we've needed to connect long before this.
Well, hopefully this is the first of many conversations. But in case our listeners aren't familiar with you and your work, can you just take a few minutes to introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about, you know, who you are as a parent and also the work that you do in the world within this community.
Sure. Okay, so I am the founder and host of the Raising Lifelong Learners website and podcast. And that was born out of kind of my own foray into homeschooling, a differently wired kiddo. We pulled my oldest out of school, traditional school in the middle of first grade. And I was scrambling to figure out what I was doing. And I started writing about it because prior to that, I had been a gifted intervention specialist for 10 years. and a classroom teacher before that and was freelance writing for the educational market. I was writing books for Prufrock Press and Corwin Press and some other places that were a great fit for my background in gifted education. And then I found myself homeschooling this profoundly gifted and twice exceptional kiddo and naturally just started writing about it.
And the site grew out of The story started resonating with others who found themselves homeschooling differently wired kiddos. And so I started writing more about that. And now, oh, gosh, like seven, eight years later, I speak at homeschooling conventions and parenting conferences about the everyday living and homeschooling those kind of quirky, differently wired kiddos.
So I just have to ask, what is a gifted intervention specialist?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Colleen Kessler to start homeschooling her gifted children?
0:00–4:54
2
How does Colleen define gifted‑intervention and twice‑exceptional education?
4:54–9:44
3
What signs indicate that a traditional school isn’t a good fit for a gifted child?
9:44–14:31
4
Why does Colleen recommend taking a break and focusing on a child’s strengths first?
14:31–19:46
5
How can parents use the “backdoor” approach to address learning challenges?
19:46–24:00
6
What are the biggest challenges families face when homeschooling differently‑wired kids?
24:00–29:09
7
Which resources and books does Colleen suggest for homeschooling gifted learners?
29:09–34:07
8
What does the new ‘Crash Course for Homeschooling That Kid’ course cover and when will it launch?
34:07–38:27
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
TPP 266a: A Conversation with Poet and Advocate LeDerick Horne
TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids