Surfing the Wave

1. Surfing the Wave The Steiner School as a Professional Learning Community

2. Our methods are not different from those others just because we want capriciously something “new” or “different,” but because the tasks of our particular age will compel us to realize the course which must be taken by education itself for humanity, if it is to answer in the future to the impulses towards development predestined in the human race by the universal world order. (Steiner, GA 294)

3. Manifesto on Planetary Consciousness A new way of thinking has become the necessary condition for responsible living and acting. Evolving it means fostering creativity in all people, in all parts of the world. Creativity is not a genetic but a cultural endowment of all human beings. (Laslo, 2006, p.150).

4. Steiner’s Vision of Social Reform Steiner developed the theoretical basis of Steiner education in three phases that mirror the wider unfolding of Anthroposophy and of the anthroposophical movement as a whole (Kiersch, 1978, 2006):

6. Steiner Teacher Education & Professional Learning Freedom through responsibility Psycho-spiritual development Freedom through meditation Contemplative Inquiry Freedom and colleagueship Professional Learning Communities

7. Freedom through meditationContemplative Inquiry

9. Cognitive breathing

10. FOUR STEPS of COGNITIVE BREATHING

11. Suppose you chanced on a painter in her studio, fully engaged in the creative process. The canvas is before her, brushes in hand. She is glancing back and forth between the object she is painting and the image on the canvas, dabbing at her palette and applying paint to the painting.Her activity is bringing about the painting as image. The being of the painting as it lives in her has given rise to her activity, and so to the image as well.The object that she is painting is the fruit of a similar process. In the spiritual imagination of the universe, there is a mind in nature as well as in the humanbeing. We are not the sole agents in the world. We create paintings, but a world mind makes the world. World mind is the agent whose activity results in sense objects. (Zajonc, 2009, pp.192-193)

13. Freedom through responsibility Psycho-spiritual development

14. Andragogy: Art & Science of Adult Learning Six Principles • Adults are internally motivated and self-directed; • Adults bring life experiences & knowledge to learning experiences; • Adults are goal directed; • Adults are relevancy directed; • Adultd are practical; • Adults like to be respected and equality between teacher & learner. (Knowles, 1973, 2011; www.gotfc.edu.au/resources/?page=6537)

15. Steiner Principles in Adult Learning The guiding motto of the adult educator is to awaken the will in the course participants - to be an ‘artist of the will’ (van Houten, 1995, pp.13 - 14).

17. Ethical Individualism The adult self-development pathway (or individuation process) is then identified as a double movement: elements of ego consciousness work their way downwards through feelings and related perceptions towards the less conscious will elements, enabling us to become more enlightened in relation to our actions (more conscious of our impulses which otherwise would stay blind and asleep in us); in a similar way, the surging of these living but unconscious will forces permeate our organism in an upward direction, activating and enlivening our heart capacities and thinking processes.

18. Love as a Cognitive Force When the power of thought and the power of will are developed further than in ordinary life, then the power of feeling, which is the deepest, most essential part of the human soul, will also be transformed. (Steiner, Reincarnation and Immortality, 1977, p.101, cited by Nestfield-Cookson, 1983, p.139)

19. Freedom and colleagueshipProfessional Learning Communities

20. The School as a PL Organisation

21. The importance of making teachers’ practice, and evidence about practice, the site for professional learning is the main recommendation in the report. • (Ingvarson & Kleinhenz, 2006, p.87) • College study must start from teachers sharing their experience in the classroom…The chief purpose of the college meeting is to be a permanent teacher education ‘academy’.

22. A paradoxical situation? Steiner’s main indication is now coming to meet us ‘from the world’ … Have we effectively fulfilled his indications? “Things must be arranged in such a way as to further the aims of the school…to base the teaching and education on a knowledge of human development. It means of course that this knowledge must be applied to every child.”

23. Psychological Perception “If we want to observe children in their real being we must acquire a psychological faculty of perception.” “The individual child is spoken about in such a way that the teachers try to grasp the nature of the human being in its special relationship to the child in question.” (Human Values pp.92-93).

24. If a school is to be a living organism, the college of teachers must be its heart and soul. College study starts from teachers sharing their experiences in the classroom which fosters unity. The purpose of college study is to develop psychological perception and width of interest; colleagues should take an interest in each others’ research. Through this study a real knowledge of human nature continuously flows out and permeates the school, bringing vitality to the work of the teachers. (Gladstone, Republican Academies, 1987)

27. Social & Anti-social Forces

28. To balance anti-social forces we need to: Build strong social structures; Work consciously with our own soul forces – this is no longer instinctive; Develop interest in each other and gratitude for all who have helped us; develop an imaginary faculty for the other (empathy); Awaken a true picture of the other free from love or hate; Become objective about ourselves – “shell out” the ego from its experiences rather than “linking up” too closely with its experiences – we are not what our experiences make us – “the spirit must make a fresh effort each time”.

29. Towards Collaboration Karl Marx’s call for the “workers of the world to unite” is based on a recognition of the new social forces at work in our time. However it is built on hatred rather than on love – and in this way it fuels anti-social forces. The ‘banding together’ is brought about by the ‘splitting up’ and separating of humankind into classes. “Each one of us can therefore work for two if we have the will.”

30. Inner work is World Work

31. The present crisis in the history of humankind demands the development in every single human being of certain faculties of perception and sensitivity, the first rudiments of which must be started at school like the first four rules of arithmetic. Hitherto society was moulded by traditional ways that never entered consciously into the life of the human soul; these will not apply in the future. Fresh evolutionary impulses are coming in and from now on will be active in human life; and every individual will be required to develop these faculties of perception just as each individual has long been required to have a certain measure of education. From now on, it is necessary that the individual should be trained to have a healthy sense of how the forces of society must work in order for it to live. (Steiner, The Threefold Social Order, Chapter 2)