Main Lesson or Seminar Teaching in a Waldorf School (...or Anywhere You Care to Teach)

Waldorf schools begin each day with what has come to be called a “main lesson”—an unfortunate term in that it subtly denigrates all the other classes of the day, although this was not Rudolf Steiner’s intention.

The high school at which I teach calls these classes “seminars” because that’s descriptive of the way we teach them, it doesn’t connote elementary education, and it doesn’t denigrate other classes.

Many of the ideas and practices recorded here have evolved over my twenty-six years of teaching; what seems simple and obvious to me now in some cases took more than ten years to become so. But slow learning is better than none at all, and it is sometimes deeper than faster learning.

I wrote the following for my teacher education students, and I share it here for the reason I initially started this blog—to provide access to things I had written for which I occasionally get requests. It saves time if they’re here to read or copy—no offprints or email attachments. This document presents main lesson primarily as a middle school history teacher might approach it because the course in which I present it is Teaching History in a Waldorf School, Grades 5-8. Teachers of other grades and other subjects will make their own adjustments.

Finally, I refer in here to doodling and to note-taking, both of which I've written about elsewhere on this blog.

Business
I begin by calling the class to order and getting business out of the way—announcements, attendance, and so forth. To say the morning verse before this—as I once did—now strikes me as bizarre. The verse prepares us to learn. So why prepare to learn and then spend ten minutes on trivial matters?

Morning Verse
Once business is accomplished, I usually say the verse with my class, although, given that many of them often arrive half asleep and malnourished, I sometimes ask them to walk or run around the school building (I used to teach in a room that had a running track just outside the back door, and a lap around this—even if calmly walked—usually brought the students back to me calmer and more alert). Then we say the verse together.

I ask politely for quiet before we begin. I never insist that students say the verse, only that they are quiet and respectful to those who do. If necessary, if no one chooses to say it, I say it myself and students listen. That’s fine. It happens perhaps once with a new group, but usually not again.

I also usually ask a student to begin the verse. If I begin it every morning, I am the one with initiative, my voice is heard, and I may be the only one who utters the word “I” that begins the verse—students joining gradually, “…into the world,” leaving off the “I look.” There are other ways to accomplish this—through regimentation and discipline—but I’ve chosen this different way. I believe this practice is fine to use with students beginning in roughly sixth grade. Before this, I wouldn’t call on their “I” so much.

For Middle School Only
After the verse, perhaps 10 minutes of singing, recorder playing, or speech. I don’t do “mental math” unless we are in a math block. If I did happen to decide to do it, I wouldn’t do it on the same day as recorder or singing or anything else. I don’t find anything about “circle time” in Steiner’s work, and I believe that his request for economy in teaching asks me to get on with my history lesson. (Math requires extra practice, it’s true, but this can be scheduled at a different point in the day, not during main lesson.) In high school classes, I don’t even do any of this, but proceed right to the lesson.

Main Lesson or Seminar
First review (feeling, judgment, discussion), then new material (thinking—but warm and interested thinking), then, if time remains (which I believe it should in middle school, perhaps less in high school), work (will).

Review
The review has three functions. The first is to come to some judgment, conclusion, or opinion regarding the material of the previous day (or previous days; there are clearly times when a “summing up” involves matter learned over several days—observing the changes in form and feeling as we pass from Egyptian through archaic Greek to classical Greek postures in sculpture, for example). This may take five minutes, and it may take nearly an hour. It’s good for me to have a plan for the day, but I am almost always willing to stray from it if student questions (legitimate questions) ask for a longer discussion or review.

A more mundane function of the review is to give notes from the day before, which I put on the board and then answer questions while students copy them. I developed this technique as I became increasingly aware of the strangeness of the process of asking students to pay careful attention to what I am saying while also remembering and writing down what I just said fifteen seconds ago. This splitting of consciousness, I believe, works against actual learning (it’s a necessary skill in college, but can be developed quickly late in high school). By giving notes the day after a presentation, we cover the material twice, and students can listen without interruption to new material.

The third function of the review is to address a question with which I have left the class on the previous day (see below). Again, doing this may take a couple of sentences, shedding a little light in the darkness, or it may yield a full-blown discussion.

(Steiner: “When they return on the following day they again have the spiritual photographs of the previous day’s lesson in their heads. I connect today’s lesson with them by a reflective, contemplative approach—for example, a discussion on whether Alcibiades or Mithradates was a decent or an immoral person.

When I make an objective, characterizing approach on the first day, followed on the next day by reflection, by judgments, I shall allow the three parts of the threefold human being to interact, to harmonize in the right way.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

New Material
Following the review, I present new material. I ask students to listen quietly. I ask them NOT to take notes (see review above).* I ask them to hold all questions, and to jot down any questions while I am speaking in order to ask them at the end of my presentation (which my students have taken to calling “Story Time with Steve”). Student questions can turn a twenty minute story into an hour’s drudgery as they ask about what I was just about to address, or they ask interesting but digressive questions. I resolve not to digress too much or to interrupt myself during this time, too. Unless behavior absolutely requires it, I won’t stop the class for an elbow bump or a giggle. The start-stop of “regular” discipline can lead to greater chaos than overlooking small slights. If necessary, I can make a note and address it later. If I can and need to, I can calmly walk over to a student without breaking my speech and turn him around, or remove a note from her hand, or otherwise indicate that a behavior is unnecessary.

I allow students to doodle, to knit, or otherwise to quietly, privately occupy their hands. I fought this for more than ten years before I awoke to the fact that I had been a good, attentive student my entire life, through graduate school, and had doodled incessantly, despite all attempts to make me stop. As long as my students are listening and not distracting each other, their quiet activity doesn’t bother me.**

A history presentation involves four basic elements:
1. Creating distance in time, a sense of time;
2. Creating a sense of space—how far is it from here to there; how would you travel in those times? And of place—what is the geography, how would someone living then experience it, how did it influence these people? What is the climate?
3. Creating a sense of character—what we often call “biography,” although really I’m simply telling stories of different lives (birth dates, father’s occupation, and other such trivia are usually inconsequential and the students and I know it; or these things can be included easily in notes on the following day if it is necessary to have some record of them).
4. And creating a sense of an event or happening. Any more than this is unnecessary in middle school, and much more than this is not even necessary in high school; discussions bring out 5. the larger themes—I don’t “teach” them, we discover them in conversation, usually in review. (See Steiner’s work for specific indications for themes and topics for each year, including approaches to history in high school years.)

(Steiner: “Let us take another example, a history lesson. In the teaching of history there is no apparatus, no experiment. I must find a way of again adapting the lesson to the life processes, and I can do this as follows. I give the children the mere facts that occur in space and time. The whole being is again addressed just as during an experiment, because the children are called upon to make themselves a mental picture of space. We should see to it that they do this, that they see what we tell them, in their minds. They should also have a mental picture of the corresponding time. When I have brought this about, I shall try to add details about the people and events—not in a narrative way, but merely by characterization.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

Questions
Following story time, I ask for questions. Sometimes there are none; students bask in what they have just heard. Other times, I haven’t said what I thought I said, or been heard as I meant to be heard, and I have to explain or present something again. I generally try to answer all questions, but, if necessary, I end the section by promising to answer questions privately or address them in the future.

Details, Recapitulation
If there are details I need to add that weren’t central to my presentation—a perspective on life in those times, an anecdote that isn’t central but that illuminates something relevant, and so on—I add them at this point. If we’re short on time, I keep it short. If the review and presentation have gone quickly, I can “digress” and add a lot. This time also allows me to briefly recapitulate or synopsize the material I have presented.

(Steiner: “I now describe and draw the children’s attention to what they heard in the first part of the lesson. In the first part, I occupied their whole being; in the second, it is the rhythmic part of their being that must make an effort. I then dismiss them.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

A Last Question
I complete my presentation in two important ways, ways that, although they may take only a few seconds of time, lay the foundation for my future teaching, give the students something to chew on overnight, and lay the ground for good discipline (which is to say, good behavior, which is to say, an attitude of wanting to learn, to hear what I have to say). I ask an open-ended, discussion question, such as, “You learned today about all the different characteristics of cave paintings. What do you make of these? In particular, why is it important—I’ll tell you that I believe it’s very significant—that these paintings have a black outline around them?” Students may leap to answer immediately, but they know I won’t say more until the next day. They can talk on the playground, ask mom and dad at dinner, or forget the question until I remind them the next day, but they’ve heard it and taken it in. The question previews the next day’s review.

Anticipation
I also make a statement about what we’ll learn the next day. It may be prosaic—“Tomorrow we’ll move on to the study of ancient Egypt”—but it’s better if I can make it slightly mysterious—“Tomorrow you’ll learn about people who gave coffins as great gifts.” Whether they remember or not, these questions work in the students overnight and they enter the classroom ready to learn (and ready not to misbehave). I believe these few seconds are the single greatest discipline technique I know. I also know that if I don’t write down my question and topic, I will likely forget them until the class is dismissed. Even if I can conduct the lesson without notes, I write down these items in order to remember them.

Work
Then we get to work on essays, drawings, or paintings. We may go to the library to do research. The longer I teach, the less necessary I believe homework to be, and I try, especially in middle school, to have students complete their work, or at least the bulk of it, in class. We clean up our work (“Mr. Sagarin, can I keep working during recess?” “Yes, you may”), stand quietly behind our chairs, and are dismissed for snack and recess.

Attention
So this is what I aim at. It rarely goes as planned and never perfectly. But more important than anything listed above is attention to the students. Do I need to shorten my presentation because the students are exhausted? Fine. Does something I read inspire them, and I keep reading for an extra twenty minutes, and continue the next day? An example: One year I read a portion of Voltaire’s Candide to a class, simply to give them the flavor of his writing and thinking. They were so taken by it that we read a chapter a day for the rest of the block. I had not intended to do anything like this, but see great value in attending to students’ actual interests. Does my review fall on deaf ears? I’ll cut it short and spend an evening thinking about how to present it in a way that these students can hear.

Also, and this is tough to write about clearly, I try to be specifically aware of each student—I’m not good at this, but I try to make sure each student speaks at least once in each class (and that some students don’t speak too much). I try to pay attention to those who need attention and leave alone those who seem to need to be left alone. Also, if something I’m teaching relates to the circumstances of one of the students, directly (parent dies in real life; parent of historical figure died young) or indirectly (this student is obsessed with fairness, and someone I’m teaching about was known for being extremely fair), I keep the student in mind. I don’t blurt out, “Oh, and Johnny, didn’t your father die young, too?” In fact, I’m likely to try to be more tactful in discussing the historical circumstances, rather than less, given what I know. These may not be the best examples, but I think the point—lessons meet real life, we hope tactfully, in a classroom—is clear.

“Typical” Main Lesson (That is, one that never actually occurs)
10 min.: Class business.
3 min.: Verse.
15 min.: Music, but not in high school (I still wonder how necessary this really is in a main lesson period).
20 min.: Review (highly variable; and I increasingly think of this as the period of “real” learning—new material is an introduction…); discussion; note-taking.
20-30 min.: New material, including questions and added description (longer in HS).
1 min.: Question.
1 min.: Preview.
30-40 min.: Work; giving and collecting assignments. If everyone’s doing well, I can get some work done, too. (Shorter, but still present, in HS.)
Dismissal.

My Name is Steve, and I'm a Cheater

“Surveys show that cheating in school… has soared since researchers first measured the phenomenon on a broad scale at 99 colleges in the mid-1960s.”
—Maura J. Casey, “Digging out Roots of Cheating in High School,” NY Times, Oct. 13, 2008


In high school—I went to a Waldorf high school—I cheated all the time. I gave out lots of answers, and received plenty, including in a German class that consisted of two students and an excellent teacher.

We loved Dr. Macht, his warmth, his war stories. But when it came to testing, he was terrible. He’d doze off, or leave the room. He wouldn’t notice that we’d written all the answers on the blackboard and then patted the eraser lightly over them. The board looked clean, but it was filthy with vocabulary.

I acknowledge my moral failing in cheating in his class. But Dr. Macht didn’t really care, so we didn’t care. The whole thing seems to have been a collusion between Dr. Macht and us—“I have to test you, but this won’t really do much to improve your language skills, so I’ll disengage myself, and you can do what you like.” I learned German anyway, passing a translation exam for my doctorate fifteen years later without studying. But the learning and the testing were clearly in different categories.

In middle school we taught each other cool ways to cheat. You can take a penknife, carve a bit of the paint off a pencil, and write a few helpful answers in tiny letters on the bare wood. You can tape a cheat-sheet to the back of the chair of the student in front of you. You can write on the white rubber of your converse sneakers, or on your jeans, or on your hand, although that’s the first and, often, only place a teacher will look. This was before cell phones and texting.

In high school we were just brazen—we whispered or mouthed answers across the rows, exchanged papers or tests, or just talked to each other when a teacher left the room. We prepared answer sheets in advance, then slipped them into our test booklets or piles of scrap paper.

Not everyone cheated, but most did, regardless of intelligence. I’d say more boys than girls cheated, but, then, I was a boy.

After high school, I went to a college that had a strict honor code. To this day, I remember it—we had to write it and sign it on every exam: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.” I didn’t cheat in college, I wasn’t tempted to, and I never witnessed anyone else cheating. Professors placed piles of exams at the front of the room, then left. We students took the exams in the allotted time and handed them in. We could stretch out in the hall, return to our rooms, do what we liked, as long as the exam was in on time.

What was the difference? I was older in college, possibly more mature (although, living away from home, possible less), and the stakes may have been higher. But, really, the difference was in school and teacher expectations.

The consequences for cheating in high school were minimal—warning, admonishment, a lower grade. In high school, teachers—even good teachers, of which I had more than my fair share—were too self-involved or too careless. If they didn’t really care, neither did we. Why did they give tests? To appease parents or colleagues? Because it was something that teachers do? Usually, their hearts weren’t in it.

Those teachers who cared made it clear, and, for the most part, we took them seriously. “Hey. You really have to study for Mr. Madsen’s tests.” We did study, and we didn’t cheat, and we respected Mr. Madsen.

In college, it was clear, we could be expelled for cheating or plagiarizing. In college, the teachers weren’t necessarily less self-involved or careless, they didn’t necessarily believe in the educational efficacy of testing. The institution, the community of the school, however, made expectations and consequences clear, beyond any idiosyncrasies of our (sometimes very) idiosyncratic teachers. The school cared, so the individual teachers didn’t have to. The community of the school—teachers, students, administrators—took the question of cheating seriously, wrote a simple code, empanelled students and teachers to deal with violations, and secured “buy in” from everyone.

Today I work in a tiny high school of twenty students. It’s easy to police a test or exam, but I suspect some students still cheat. I tell my students about my high school experience, however, and also about my college experience. I let them know that I take cheating seriously, and that I will fail them for the course (not just for the test or the assignment) if they cheat. I also tell them that if I give them a test it will be designed fairly to allow them to demonstrate what they know, not to trip them up or to require cramming irrelevant facts. I also sit in the back of the room, behind them, so I can see them and they can’t see me. This makes illicit behavior easier to spot.

Writing a “real” test, one that fairly assesses knowledge and ability and that makes cheating difficult, is a chore, but it’s a worthwhile chore. If the answers aren’t things that can be whispered between students, or copied onto a crib sheet, students will find it harder to cheat, even if they want to. If they know that their teachers respect them and their mutual educational work, they’ll be less prone to cheating. If they know that teachers and school take cheating seriously, too, they’ll be less willing to risk the consequences.

The Internet has made it easier to cheat on papers—copying and pasting replace thinking and writing—but it’s also made it easy to catch cheaters. A few years ago, one of my students wrote a biography of Che Guevara. I suspected that the work wasn’t the student’s own. I chose five words from his paper that seemed like words he might not use, typed them into Google, and was directed instantly to the obscure paper, posted to the web, from which he had copied. It took me about fifteen seconds. I tell my current students this story, too.

I don’t know for certain that my students don’t cheat on tests, but I’m pretty sure they’re better behaved than I was at their age. Part of my teaching today is to avoid the mistakes my own teachers and I made a long time ago.