Research Bulletin

By Bob Anderson

Download the article: Update: LEAP Project

The goal of the Waldorf LEAP is to develop learning expectations and a model assessment system for Waldorf schools, one that is fully aligned with the curriculum, teaching methods, developmental model of learning, and goals of Waldorf education, and that can provide Waldorf teachers and parents with a rich, qualitative picture of their students' progress towards achieving those goals.

The Project will be carried out by a collaborative of professional researchers and Waldorf educators, working throughout the nation with experienced individual teachers, teacher teams, and schools to reach a consensus vision of learning expectations for Waldorf students and to provide assistance to teachers in the assessment of student progress. Initial efforts will proceed in the areas of language arts, mathematics, and remedial education.

By Cindy Bajema

Download the article: Update: San Francisco Conference...

Polarities and Constitutional Types
A conference for teachers, therapists and physicians

This year's alumni conference of the San Francisco Waldorf Teacher Training of Rudolf Steiner College explored the theme of the four polarities or constitutional types which Rudolf Steiner characterized in various lectures.⁽¹⁾ Not just for alumni, the conference brought together about 40 people, including teachers, doctors, and therapists. The conference was organized and moderated by Dorit Winter, Director of the SF Teacher Training, and took place at the San Francisco Waldorf School on October 9 and 10, 1999.

By Susan Howard

Download the article: Update: The Work of the Waldorf Education Research Institute

In the January 1999 Research Bulletin, we reported on the work of the Waldorf Education Research Institute in its first three years. We expressed the need for financial support in order to achieve the following aims:

• Development of an active Advisory Board to identify and set priorities for research needs of the Waldorf movement
• Funding for the position of Director to coordinate and direct the various activities of the Institute
• Identifying and reviewing existing research within the Waldorf movement and relevant current research from the wider educational community
• Translating existing research from German into English
• Identifying and supporting worthy individual and group research projects.

By Roberto Trostli

Download the article: Balance in Teaching, Balance in Working, Balance in Living

Based on a talk given March 12 in Spring Valley, NY, at the Healthy Waldorf Schools Conference, sponsored by the Eastern Region of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America

Balance in teaching, balance in working, and balance in living-what could possibly qualify me to speak about this subject? I am certainly not a paragon of balance-quite the contrary! Yet those who suffer from an affliction are sometimes especially qualified to speak about it because they have first-hand experience of something others have only observed.

During the past years, as I have reflected on my teaching, my work, and my life, I have struggled to develop a vocabulary to describe my experiences more accurately. My life as a teacher swung between the extremes of selfishness and self-sacrifice. Is there a balance between these two? Is there a middle realm where we are at the same time self-less-in other words, less our everyday lower self-and self-more-more our eternal Self.

Download the article: Adult Education in the Light of Anthroposophy

The following article also appeared in Paideia, the educational research journal published by the Steiner Schools Fellowship in England. It is currently being worked with as study material by the teacher training institutes in the AWSNA Teacher Education Committee as they explore questions of Waldorf teacher training and adult education in North America.

Since the 1960s many anthroposophical adult education institutions have arisen throughout the world. Often they arose out of the need to train Waldorf teachers, but today they represent a primary avenue by which newcomers first meet and take up anthroposophy. Given all the destiny-changing influence these institutions have facilitated, we might ponder where the anthroposophical movement would be without them. Nonetheless, for all that can be credited to these adult education institutions, their activity does raise questions and concerns.

Download the article: Setting Priorities for Research

On March 26th, members of the WER1 Advisory Board and a few guests met to review the work of the Research Institute and to consider impulses for the Institute's future work.

Present were Henry Barnes, John Brousseau, Stephen Edelglass, Douglas Gerwin, Antje Ghaznavi, Craig Holdredge, Michael Howard, Susan Howard, Diana Hughes, Douglas Sloan, Chris Schaefer, Eugene Schwartz, Patti Smith, Betty Staley, Roberto Trostli, and Jane Wulsin.

Download the article: Update: Attention-Related Disorders (ARD) Study

Research Team
Kim Payne and Bonnie River

Research Advisors
Richard Fried, MD
Martha Hadley
Steven Johnson, MD
Alicia Landman-Reiner, MD
Arthur Zajonc

Advisory Team
Michaela Glöckler, MD
Charles Hopkins
Talu Robertson
Dee Coulter

New Developments: Spring 2000
Interviews
The interview phase of the project is now complete. Doctors, speech therapists, art therapists spatial dynamic/movement therapists, neurologists, eurythmists (both curative and educational), class teachers, subject teachers, and remedial teachers have offered a rich and fascinating insight into the way they see ARD and how they work with it. The interviews ranged from 2-5 hours each with either audio tape or detailed notes being the record-taking method. The information that has been gathered gives a solid foundation for future research steps.

Download the article: Update: Learning Expectations...

Last January thanks to a joint grant from WERI and the Midwest Gifting Group, the Waldorf Learning Expectations and Assessment Project took its own leap off the drawing board into a living process. Project Coordinators Freda Easton and Roberto Trostli on the East Coast and Betty Staley, Karen Anderson and Bob Anderson on the West Coast began working with a small group of volunteer Waldorf teachers to develop the first drafts of Waldorf student learning expectations. Teachers from the Hawthorne Valley School in New York and from a duster of Northern California schools in the Sacramento and Bay areas began by crafting expectations for student learning in four areas of the language arts: speaking, listening, writing, and reading-in kindergarten through third grade. The key questions guiding the work were “What are some of the most important things Waldorf students are expected to learn or be able to do in each area and at each grade level? And what do teachers look for to tell if their students have learned those things?”

Download the article: Update: Cultural Renewal for the New Millennium

An Invitational Research Consultation on the theme of educational tasks for the new millennium was held last April at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City. The Consultation was sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Spiritual Foundations of Education at Teachers College, with the cooperation of the Waldorf Education Research Institute at Sunbridge College, and the Alliance for Childhood, a partnership of medical personnel, parents, social workers, and other advocates for children.

By Langdon Winner

Download the article: Confronting the Culture of Disrespect

This article is a talk given to the symposium on “Cultural Renewal for the New Millennium: Major Challenges and Educational Tasks,” held at Teachers College, Columbia University, April, 2000 by the Center for the Study of the Spiritual Foundations of Education at Teachers College. The Center is funded by the Fetzer Institute.

Two features of contemporary American life may seem entirely unconnected, but upon closer inspection they stand out as dimensions of the same unsettling pattern. One is an all-too-familiar disposition in human relationships, an attitude about how to treat people that strongly affects our children and undermines even the best-planned attempts to educate them. Although it manifests itself in what seem to be scattered, annoying incidents in the lives of kids, this attitude has recently achieved attention as a malady of national concern. A second feature finds expression in a strategy of technological change characteristic of our dynamic “new economy.” Celebrated as a wonderful recipe for prosperity, this strategy is rooted in a general orientation to the world that, in its broader dimensions, projects a dubious path for social development.

Download the article: Where Is the Waldorf School Movement Going?

Transcript by the author of a lecture in the series “Quo Vadis Europa?” held in the Christian Community in Bochum, originally published in “Das Goetheanum,” March, 26, 2000, translated by Jan-Kees Saltet

The British historian Niall Ferguson (1999) reinterprets the outbreak and course of the First World War by considering not only what happened, but also what could have happened. He looks for the latent possibilities in certain situations. This way of working with “counterfactual scenarios” allows a new evaluation of events, and at the same time, it stimulates us clearly to imagine hidden possibilities which, in our present-day situation, could be taken up—or not. In light of this, it is interesting to ask ourselves what could have happened in Germany after the collapse of 1945 if the new government would not only have allowed the free development of the economy, but also of the cultural and spiritual life, including education. In retrospect, “free enterprise” and the “German economic miracle” seem sensible and fitting responses to a desolate situation. Where would we be today, however, if a similar thing had taken place in our schools and universities? We would now have confident and enterprising teachers who would work with the same energy as the many middle-class entrepreneurs who brought about the economic miracle. In cooperation with free parent organizations, these teachers would initiate and maintain a colorful and dynamic education miracle. We would be in the vanguard of progress.

By Lowell Monk and Valdemar Setzer

Download the article: Computers in Education: Why, When, How

Excerpts from Challenging the Applications: An Alternative View on Why, When, and How Computers Should be Used in Education, where more details and a comprehensive bibliography may be found.

Introduction
Since the 1970s, computers have been inserted into schools with much fanfare and great expense. Almost all of the attention to computers has revolved around the question of how to put them to use as tools for education—with the superficial response being: every way possible. Subsequent assessments have focused primarily on their effectiveness as an aid to learning and on how well students are prepared for their use beyond school. Through all of this, almost no attention has been paid to the more fundamental issue of the effects that the very use of computers has on young people. A determination of the proper role of computers in education must begin with an understanding of the computer's effects on the user. This basic concern will serve as the point of departure, eventually broadening to a critique of current uses and recommendations for governing the use of computers in education.

By Jennifer Schieffer and R.T. Busse

Download the article: Low SES Minority Fourth-Graders' Achievement

Students from low socioeconomic environments often have a difficult time in school. Socioeconomic status (SES) consistently is found to be positively correlated with achievement (Boocock, 1972; Matuszek & Haskin, 1978; Shakiba-Nejad & Yellin, 1981), and is one of the most important predictors of academic achievement in public school (Boocock, 1972). Children from low SES urban communities face some of the worst learning conditions in the nation (Esposito, 1999) and many children entering school from the inner-city are increasingly viewed as “broken” and socially troubled (McDermott & Varenne, 1995).

From an ecological perspective, there are several factors related to lower achievement among children from lower socioeconomic environments. Lower SES parent figures have fewer resources to meet the physical, emotional, and educational needs of their children, as well as their own needs. A positive home learning environment, however, can be a powerful influence on achievement. Parent modeling, motivating children to be learners, and parent contact with school are important process variables that have been found to increase the achievement of children of all SES levels (Christenson, 1995).

By Dorit Winter

Download the article: Balancing the Four Polarities

Case Studies of Waldorf Children and Anthroposophical Therapies
A project sponsored by the Waldorf Education Research Institute

Introduction
In his educational lectures, Rudolf Steiner described four polarities as ways to view and understand the developing child. In Balance in Teaching, he described children whose egos are incarnated either too loosely or too deeply; in Education for Adolescence, he spoke about cosmic and earthly children and about children who are either rich or poor in imagination and memory, and in Faculty Meetings, he described large- and small-headed children.

Each of these polarities is a way of considering and assessing one member of the fourfold human being. The overly loose or deep incarnation of the ego clearly relates to the ego organization. The polarity of richness or poverty of imagination or memory primarily concerns the astral organization. The cosmic-earthly polarity refers to the predominance of the Individuality's pre-earthly being vs. telluric influences (including heredity) in the formation of the etheric body. The polarity of large- vs. small-headedness has to do with mineral, lifeless substances, i.e., that which returns to dust at the end of ones earthly life.the physical body.

By Michael Howard

Download the article: The Role of Art in Human Development

“Our nation is not ‘at risk’ because the schools are failing; schools are failing because our nation, and our culture have entered a period of serious decline.”
Ron Miller, Introduction of What Are Our Schools For?

Is education “at risk?”
Is Waldorf education “at risk?”
Is education at risk because our culture is at risk?
Is the culture of Waldorf education equally at risk?

The growth of Waldorf education and the corresponding increase in the number of children benefiting from it are a clear indication that Waldorf educators have a leading role to play in meeting the growing need for alternative approaches in education. At the same time, however, growing numbers of Waldorf educators are painfully aware of an ironic twist in this positive development: Could short-term growth pose a long-term threat to Waldorf education?

By Roberto Trostli

Download the article: Main Lesson Block Teaching...

When Rudolf Steiner inaugurated the first Waldorf school, he established the “main lesson”—a two-hour class during which all academic subjects except for foreign languages would be taught. The subjects taught in the main lesson were studied for block of time lasting from three to six or more weeks.

Teaching in main lesson blocks has become one of the most successful and distinguishing features of Waldorf education, for it allows teachers to cover the curriculum intensively and economically, and it provides the students with the fullest possible immersion in a subject. The students’ experience of the subject is further deepened by allowing the subject to “go to sleep,” before being “reawakened” later in the year or in the following year. Through this process of forgetting and remembering, students return to a subject with new interest and new insights. The time between the main lesson blocks in a subject allows students’ concepts to develop gradually and to mature. Knowledge needs time to take root, blossom, and bear fruit. The main lesson block assures that students have sufficient time to experience a living process of learning.

Download the article: Rudolf Steiner Library Information

The Rudolf Steiner Library, national library of the Anthroposophical Society in America, would like to introduce its resources and services to all Waldorf parents and teachers. We would like to announce our new outreach program designed to ensure that not only all teachers, but also all parents of Waldorf students know that they can have easy access to the library's 20,000 volumes—thousands of which deal directly with education, childhood, and the curriculum. As you know, members of the society receive borrowing privileges at the library as part of their membership. Anyone else may join the library upon application and payment of yearly dues ($20, plus a one-time, refundable $25 deposit).

By Dave Grossman

Download the article: Trained to Kill

This article was based on a presentation in an international peace conference in Bethel College, Kansas, and was published in the August, 1998 issue of Christianity Today. Since then it has been reprinted in numerous periodicals around the world.

Murder Simulators
Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old mass murderer in the Paducah, Kentucky school shootings had never fired a pistol in his life. He stole a .22 pistol from a neighbor, fired a few practice shots, and took it to school.

FBI data shows that trained law enforcement officers average around 20% hits in real world situations at an average distance of 21 feet. In the 1998 Amadu Dialo shooting, four NYPD officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed African immigrant, at point blank range and hit him 19 times. This is about the level of accuracy you will find from trained marksmen in real world situations. In Los Angeles, in 1999, a neo-Nazi walked into a Jewish daycare center and fired over 70 shots, wounding five helpless children. This is the norm from untrained shooters.

By Michaela Glöckler
Translated by Jan-Kees Saltet

Download the article: Education of the Will as the Wellspring of Morality

This article is a written adaptation of a lecture by Michaela Glöckler of July 6th, 1993, which was printed in the Erziehungskunst #10 of October, 1993. The preface in italics is part of the introduction which was written by the editors of Erziehungskunst.

In the face of increasing violence and aggression, the question becomes more and more pressing: How can education contribute to the moral development of children and adolescents? The usual approach to the problem often assumes that one has only to explain the rules of social behavior to children and that better insight will automatically lead to an improvement of behavior. Experience shows, however, that one doesn't reach the source of behavior in this way. Intellectual moralizing or giving reprimands do not deeply affect the way children act. The sources of moral.or immoral.action reside in that unconscious layer of the soul in which the will impulses originate. Therefore Michaela Glöckler asks: What really reaches this sphere at the different stages of child development? How does the education of the will create the conditions from which morality proper can develop when the child comes of age?

By Arthur Auer

Download the article: Hand Movements Sculpt Intelligence

An exerpt from Learning About the World Through Modeling.Sculptural Ideas for School and Home, which will be published by the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.

The human hand is a very special organ. A long-time Waldorf teacher, Arvia Mackaye Ege, who taught handwork for many years, characterized beautifully its special role and significance for human existence and education:

Through the fact that man is an upright being and his hands are thus freed from resting on the earth, they have become, down through the ages, the most marvellous instruments. The shape of the hand with its five delicate, mobile fingers surrounding the quiet center of the palm, intimates its connection with the rays and impulses of the five-pointed star, the pentagram—that special creative form found, for instance, in the rose family and also basic to man himself! An organ of the sense of touch, it can be used to feel, to grasp, to move, mold, intertwine, or to relate other objects to one another, but also to make free gestures expressive of the inner dictates of the soul. Through infinite variations of all these, it has become one of man's most creative and, at the same time, selfless organs. Rudolf Steiner has spoken of the hands as the eyes of the rhythmic system. And one who works much with his hands may well feel how an essential part of his being would be blind without them. [The rhythmical use of the hands] works in a mobile, living way upon the development of brain cells, so that [the child’s] physical brain will become a far more pliant and sensitive instrument for ‘living thought’ and for clear, strong, mobile knitting of thoughts when he has grown to full adulthood.⁽¹⁾

Download the article: Rudolf Steiner Library Information

National Library of the Anthroposophical Society in America
65 Fern Hill Rd. Ghent, New York, 12075
518-672-7690
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The library is a treasure trove of material for home-schoolers and Waldorf teachers.

Membership
The Rudolf Steiner Library is a national, mail-order lending library. The library has over 25,000 volumes covering the full spectrum of western and eastern spirituality, and multimedia offerings as well. Members of the Anthroposophical Society in America are automatically members of the library; non-members are welcome to join for $20 a year, plus a one-time, refundable $25 deposit.

By David Mitchell

Download the article: Creating a Sense of Wonder in Chemistry

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to WONDER and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.…To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.
-Albert Einstein

Wonder is an experience which blossoms in the soul when one is suddenly surprised and amazed by the attentive consideration of something rare, astonishing, and extraordinary. When we feel wonder we feel enlivened through our own vitality and feel a direct connection with an archetypal spark in the Universe. Wonder is the seed of knowledge.

By Craig Holdrege

Download the article: Science a Process or Dogma?

A Waldorf high school science teacher stands before a wonderful and yet difficult task. We need to be at home in modern scientific research in the fields in which we are teaching, but we also need to transcend the narrow confines of the theory-driven, reductionist approach so widespread in science and science teaching today. Much of what we learn about science today has a dogmatic character - we learn about theories as if they were hard facts and not ways of interpreting the phenomena. Where textbooks and the Discovery channel offer answers, a Waldorf science teacher should be raising questions. We need to penetrate to the facts, to the actual scientific process. This is by no means easy.

In the following essay I describe a famous example from evolutionary biology that I gradually realized was much more complicated and problematic than my textbook knowledge. I now cringe at the thought that I had been passing this example on to my students. I came to see how this example can show the pitfalls and promises of so much science teaching today. I hope this essay will stimulate other science teachers to think more critically about the examples they use in the classroom to “prove” a point. I also hope non-scientists will benefit through the journey and gain a clearer, and more critical view of how science works. I offer one more prefacing remark: Waldorf schools are sometimes criticized for being soft on science or, even worse, for teaching pseudo-science. Such criticism may be valid in individual cases, but it cannot be directed at the Goethean, phenomenological methodology, which lies (or rather should lie) at the heart of Waldorf science teaching. This essay can at very least show that a Goethean approach in which one views participation on the part of the scientist as a central part of science - leads to a critical and reflective view of science that protects both student and teacher from dogmatism. And dogmatism should be the enemy of every science teacher. To help students view and experience science as a living process, and not as a teaching or an edifice of “facts” is, in my view, a far truer embodiment of the scientific spirit than much of what one finds today around the globe in classrooms and textbooks.

By Michael Howard

Download the article: Spirit Will and Ethical Individuality

The education and teaching of the future will have to set particular value on the development of the will and feeling nature....Feeling and will are left more and more to what is called chance, because there is no insight into the real nature of will.
Rudolf Steiner, The Foundations of Human Experience, Lecture 4

The Need For Insight Into Will
If our intent as teachers and parents is to develop our children’s full human potential, we will want to educate their feeling and will with as much insight and care as we bring to the development of their thinking. If we recognize that in this regard our insight is inadequate then our task is clear—we must seek every means to cultivate deeper insight into the nature and development of feeling and will.

By Mark Riccio

Download the article: Did Rudolf Steiner Want a Seven-Grade...

This article examines the question: Was the original eight-grade sequence in the Waldorf elementary schools the result of a necessary compromise Rudolf Steiner made? This question grows in importance because some Waldorf educators have been reconsidering the effectiveness of having a class teacher for eight years. In Switzerland, for instance, Waldorf schools have considered changing to a seven-year sequence because of the difficulties teachers have had growing with their class.

In Waldorf education, the teacher and students build a profound heart-to-heart relationship over the course of eight years. The advantages of such a deep and meaningful growing together become apparent to anyone who has experienced it, or its opposite for that matter. It has always been fascinating to me to hear veteran Waldorf teachers speak about how they had to meet the challenges of learning so many subjects and growing with their class. Some Waldorf teachers felt inadequate in the face of these challenges because they did not have the necessary background, skill, or support to grow with a class except for a limited number of grades. Should Waldorf class teachers teach the entire span of elementary grades? Was that span intended to be seven rather than eight years? In this article I do not attempt to arrive at final answers to these questions, but I hope to prompt further discussion regarding what is in the best interest of Waldorf students and their teachers.