Waldorf Education... (so much for shorter!)

Ok, I promised a post about why I think my son's school is so cool.  I want to stress that this is my opinion.  Some or all of you may not agree with me.  For those of you who have looked into Waldorf, and like what you see, you'll understand.

My son is going to a Waldorf-inspired, charter school.  The "waldorf-inspired" is an important distinction, requested by the private Waldorf schools, to demonstrate that the charter does not offer all of the features or opportunities of the private school.  (It also means it's free, or nearly-free, as opposed to costing around $12k/year.)  This is a public school, part of the school district, that has been granted a charter by either the district or the state (I'm not sure which), to teach in the Waldorf method.  The school is required by the district to have credentialed teachers in every classroom, but the school requires that the teacher ALSO have completed some or all of the Waldorf teacher training.

Personally, I like this feature.  I like knowing that his teachers have the same credentials as any public school teacher.  I also like that these teachers loved the Waldorf method of teaching so much they opted to go back to school to complete yet another teaching program.  I also love that they felt like there was a better way of teaching than what is currently being offered, and set out to find out more about it.  All of them could get better paying jobs at other schools.  They chose to teach here, for the love of the children.  That speaks to me.

The instructors in all of my child development classes so far seem to agree on one thing; kids are being pushed way too hard, way too early, in a desperate attempt to bring our test scores up and show the rest of the country/world that we are dedicated to giving our kids a great education.  It seems to me that the people deciding curriculum look at the problem like this:

Problem:  The reading scores for 4th graders have plummeted.

Solution:  Begin teaching the child to read in preschool and kindergarten to give the child a 'head start'.

Problem:  Math scores for freshman students are at 4th grade levels.

Solution:  Start teaching basic mathematics in preschool, so teachers can focus on more advanced math in kindergarten and 1st grade.  Introduce complex ideas early to prepare them for what is to come.

(Note:  There is more to it than that, this is a hypothetical, simplification.  Emphasis on "seems".)

The Waldorf method, however, emphasizes building a foundation, or context, for learning in the early years, and as the child ages, increases the educational context.  So while the brain is still developing, these teachers focus on listening, comprehension, movement, small-motor skills, community, team-building, sensory data, and immediate and long-term results.  

For instance, a large part of the kindergarten day is storytelling and working with the hands.  The storytelling requires the teacher to memorize a story (usually Grimm's fairy tales or similar stories) and re-tell the same story to the children every day for two weeks.  In the beginning, the story is told while the children sit and listen.  After a couple of days, the story is then told while using puppets to act out the parts.  Finally, the children become the characters and act out the story while the teacher tells it.  By the end of the two week period, the child has internalized the story.  He has been given time to become familiar with the whole story, focus on the words he may not have understood, and infer meaning to those words by the context and the acting of the story.  His vocabulary has grown, he understands the makings of a story, he has walked through the stages of the story, understanding sequence, and internalized the moral of the story implicit in most fairy tales or fables. 

The children work with their hands in a variety of ways.  The children work with beeswax, manipulating it into various shapes.  They play in the sand, pouring and sifting.  They work with wood, filing blocks into different shapes.  They learn a handwork skill, in kindergarten it is finger-knitting.  All of this builds the sensory-motor intelligence of the child.

Studies have shown that retention is stronger when the learning process is accompanied by movement.  Learning with more than one sense at a time (auditory and visual; auditory and kinesthetic; auditory, visual, and kinesthetic; auditory, oral, visual, kinesthetic and tactile) increases the probability of committing the materials to memory.  The more senses used, the better the chance of fully internalizing the subject.

But most importantly, the entire method of instruction is based first on experience, then on relating those experiences to the problem at hand.  The school tries in every way possible to give the child a physical experience to draw on before expecting that child to draw abstract conclusions about anything.  

An example from my son's kindergarten last year:  The kindergarten homework last year focused a lot on three-letter words, especially ones with the same ending sound.  The worksheet would have a list of words on the left, and a set of three pictures next to each word.  The child was supposed to circle the picture that represented the word.  (It's also important to note here that the pictures were 2-D sketches meant to approximate the thing it was representing.)  It seemed that one of the favorite word choices was a proper name.  Like Ned.  Now, unless your 5-year-old has ever known a "Ned" (mine didn't), how is he supposed to correlate the word Ned with the sketch of a guy's head?  Another of these was the word "jet" with three pictures, and one being an airplane.  If you always identified a plane as "airplane", how would a 5-year-old know that they are also called "jets"?  Or to be more specific, that smaller, faster versions of airplanes are jets.  These are examples of asking a child to draw an abstract conclusion about something he has never experienced.

I can go into a long rant here about abstract knowledge, and memory, and how that relates to reading, but I won't.

I also haven't mentioned anything about the school's focus on the imagination and how that benefits every part of his life now and in the future.

Suffice it to say, I am happy with this school's focus.  I think getting a strong foundation is much more important than piling on information my son has no idea how to use.  I think with a strong foundation to build on, the capacity for growth is limitless.