Here are some important elements that set Waldorf Academy apart from conventional schools.
Walk into Waldorf Academy, or any Waldorf school, and you will find yourself in a world of art - visual, musical, theatrical, you name it. Making art unleashes the imagination, lets creativity take over and frees a child to learn the most ‘un-artlike’ subjects in a powerful and lasting way.
There’s not much sitting around at Waldorf Academy. You will find children engaged in various activities that require them to keep their bodies moving and their minds active. Dance movement, hands-on learning, physical activities, it’s what children love to do and that happy energy is reflected in how they approach learning.
You don’t see a lot of knitting and chiselling going on at schools these days. It might seem quaint and perhaps out of place in this high-tech world, but connecting with nature, working with their hands as well as their minds, and creating something tangible are all valuable learning opportunities for children that simply can’t be replicated by computer. You might be surprised at how much math a child can learn by knitting.
A key part of Waldorf Academy’s unique approach is something we call ‘cohort teaching’ where a teacher stays with the same group of students as they transition through the grades. This does not replace subject teachers who have particular expertise in specific areas; rather, it’s a teaching style that works in harmony so that an educator is closely engaged with each child throughout their stages of development.
Let’s say we’re studying Greek History. In most schools you might have a lesson once a week over the course of a term or semester. At Waldorf Academy, you are immersed in Greek History for three to four weeks at a time with intensive two-hour presentations starting each school day. This approach provides a concentrated experience allowing time for students to internalize what they’re learning. Then, the experience is refreshed, along with their enthusiasm, by the next block.
Standard textbooks, never having a reputation for being particularly riveting, have been shown to actually dampen enthusiasm for learning. At Waldorf Academy, students learn deeply, not by reading other people’s words on a page, but by creating their own ‘books’, documenting their experiences of what they are learning and what it means to them. Students take great pride in their books which invariably demonstrate the breadth and depth of their learning.
That’s because we’ve found that starting with the accepted theory and working backward to prove it (as conventional pedagogies do), is not nearly as effective when it comes to science as following the path of real scientists, who first ask the question, then conduct experiments to find the answers.
