Elevator Speech--Part II

(My friend Winslow Eliot, a former Waldorf student and administrator and current part-time Waldorf high school English teacher, sent me her version of an elevator speech. I've decided to post it here rather than in comments on the old post in an attempt to re-spark the discussion. What do you think? What would you say?)

Person in Elevator: “What’s Waldorf Education?”

Me: “Waldorf Education, based on Rudolf Steiner’s insights into human beings, integrates three essential components:

1. It’s holistic. Education is not just about learning facts and figures; it’s about exposing students to emotional and character building skills and physical, active development. This means showing them how to accomplish and finish projects so they know they can DO things as well as think and feel them.

2. It’s developmental: A seven-year-old doesn’t learn the same way a seventeen-year-old does. We teach kinesthetically and experientially in the lower grades. We try to inspire more interest and engagement in the middle years – teaching history through the telling of biographies, for example, instead of asking students to memorize historical facts. In high school, their intellectual lives are ripe for analysis, knowledge, and weighing what matters and what students themselves can do to impact the world for the better.

3. It’s phenomenological. It’s developed and presented by teachers’ own experience and observations of children and of the subject matter.”

Who is becoming a Waldorf teacher?

I’m just wrapping up a week of teacher education (the program meets for 13 weeks over the course of a bit more than two years), and I took some notes on the backgrounds of these adult students who plan to become Waldorf school teachers:

Public school principal
Public school assistant principal
Pediatrician
Social worker
Speech therapist
Pharmaceutical sales rep
Lawyer
CFO of a small business
Business manager
College registrar
Artist
Actress
Chef
3 public school teachers
4 mothers
5 students moving from BA or MA programs to teacher education

Of these, two have some background in Waldorf education, having attended Waldorf schools for part or all of their elementary school education.

Approximately one-third first learned of Waldorf education in finding schools for their own children.

Approximately one-third are choosing a mid-career change that will almost certainly earn less money and fewer benefits but, they hope and believe, bring greater intrinsic rewards.

Approximately one-third already have advanced degrees.

Two are men; the rest are women.

Their ages range from twenty-two to fifty-five or so.