I went to school one morning with Charlotte. She is in grade 3 at the local Waldorf
School. I really don’t know very much
about the pedagogy or philosophy of the Waldorf program but at first glance
there seemed to be some nice positive things that might be nice to incorporate
into our school program. So I can’t say
that much about it. I did a little
background reading. One of the things
they noted that “Teachers in Waldorf schools are dedicated to generating an
inner enthusiasm for learning within every child…allowing motivation to arise
from within and helping engender the capacity for joyful lifelong
learning.” I would like to think that
most teachers (at least the ones that I teach with and know) have this same
dedication whether they are Waldorf teachers or not.
But anyway, things I liked about the little that I saw: The school and the classroom space were warm
and natural. Furniture all out of
natural wood was nice. They have desks
that you can fold up and conveniently move so that you have a nice open space
to do all sorts of different kinds of things.
A lot of the learning that day happened in a community circle. When it was time to do some written work they
pulled out their desks from their storage space. I enjoyed the rituals at the beginning of
each class. Some sort of chant, or poem
and song were recited and sung to mark the beginning of the lesson and to
remind the students of their role as learners.
There seems to be a lot of experiential learning that is particularly art
based too. On the morning I was there,
they had knitting class and an art class with a clay activity. And I like all of the outside learning. They have a garden and animals and they go
out into nature. Charlotte’s class has
ploughed a field, planted rye and will bake bread from the grains that they
harvest. I think the goal of our
TDSB’s eco-school program is very similar in many ways to parts of the Waldorf
program. If only resources and enough
interest and time were there to make some of these things happen.
I have to put in the disclaimer, on behalf of the teacher,
that she was a supply teacher, which I completely understand is very different
from how the class might have behaved with their regular teacher. Though the supply teacher is usually the EA
in the class so it’s not like the children don’t know her and she’s been there
for a couple of weeks. All that having
been said, I was very surprised at the behaviour of some children and what they
got away with, even during French class with the regular French teacher. I kept thinking of strategies that I would
have used to help with the behavior issues, like not allow all the difficult
boys to sit together, for example. There
were a number of put-downs that were not addressed and when the teacher left
the room after the lesson with students still in it, things got worse. Of course, I had no clout, or “jurisdiction”. The couple of things I said to students
encouraging them to stop the behaviour were met with talk-backs. I thought some of the students were quite
bored. And thought of some of our
strategies that we use that could engage more students at a time during a
lesson. One boy in the class is an
American. His parents are based here at
the American military base. I became his
new friend. He was definitely bored a
lot of the time and behaved accordingly.
He liked that I spoke English to him and so I got him to finish his math. Later in the day, he apologized to me for his
behavior earlier in the day and said it was because he always gets overly
excited when there are guests.
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