Steiner Education Australia

Presentations 2023

Andrew Hill, CEO For Parents

and Teachers

1. Our Highest Endeavour: How Does Steiner Education Build Meaningful Lives?

“Our highest endeavour is to produce young men and women who out of themselves are able to impart meaning and direction to their own lives.” From the Foreword to the first edition of Dr Rudolf Steiner’s Study of Man.

How does Steiner education build meaningful lives? Over recent years there has been some fascinating research that details just what constitutes a meaningful life. Among the key elements are purpose, story-telling, belonging and transcendence. Sound familiar? Yes, these “pillars of meaningfulness” are exactly what Steiner schools aim to deliver. But we do much more. This talk will draw together the elements of Steiner education that deliver a meaningful education and form the “pillars” of a lifelong meaningful journey for our students.

2. Seven Habits of Highly Effective Steiner Graduates

“You acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way…you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” Aristotle

After researching the lives and work of a range of very successful people, Professor Stephen Covey identified seven practices that they all had in common. His book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has been a foundation text in university management schools ever since. What of Steiner school students? Our education lays down habits of living and learning that are intended to be lifelong. There are many healthy and uplifting practices our students do almost every day, and they can become lifelong habits that provide a grounded foundation for life. Of the many, here are the ones that stand out as the seven habits of highly effective Steiner school graduates.

3. The Gift of Play: Our Lifelong Source of Creativity and Innovation

"We only play when we are in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and we are only fully a human being when we play.”

Friedrich Schiller

The world wants creativity, identified as one of the 21st century’s essential skills. Yet we all have an unlimited source of creativity, one that lives most strongly within us as children, in the form of play. One of Dr Rudolf Steiner’s greatest gifts to education was a unified vision of life, that every stage of development has importance in building a meaningful biography. The impulse to play that characterises the young child lays a foundation that extends a powerful influence of creativity right through to our old age, demonstrating Schiller’s famous words in so many different ways.

This talk will explore how the world of play manifests throughout our lifespan as a humanising, uplifting and refreshing impulse so sorely needed in our world today and into the future.

4. Stronger, Brighter, Deeper: The “Feeling” Curriculum in Steiner Education

“A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning the skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Artificial Intelligence will challenge the very nature of humanity. By separating out our intelligence from our emotional life, we risk losing that which makes us human at all. Our feelings give us our sense of meaning and to Rudolf Steiner, our highest endeavour is to help young men and women find meaning and direction out of themselves. Our feeling lives are the key to finding meaning. But like intelligence, our feelings need schooling to become rich and mature and then they can guide us from within as an inner understanding. Steiner education has the unique task of growing this new form of feeling cognition, an intelligence wedded to feeling, a heart thinking.

How do teachers do this? As the great fiction writer Ursula Le Guin puts it, Steiner teachers are like good writers who care about words, and how they shape the inner lives of their growing students. They embed creativity into the learning process, and imbue formal learning with a powerful artistry that helps the intellect to sing, and the heart to understand.

This talk will explore the building of “cognitive feeling’ or heart thinking as it grows through the curriculum from Kindergarten to Year 12: essentially the “feeling” curriculum of Steiner education, preparing a sense of meaning in our students’ lives, and making them stronger, brighter, deeper.

5. Eternity in an Hour, From Fairy Tale to Faust: The Main Lesson Curriculum and the Human Story

To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

In the Main Lesson journey in a Steiner School, our students traverse elements of the human story, from the ancient and beautiful dreaming archetypes of First Nations stories and fairy tales, through to the deeply troubling challenges of contemporary life, now and into an unknown future. This journey is a global one, spanning many cultures and epochs, charting the rise of the modern, contemporary world that our students will inhabit.

This talk will undertake a short version of this long and timeless journey, and show how these profound archetypes can equip our students for the troubling challenges ahead.

6. Our Storied Hearts: Seeing What’s Invisible to the Eye

Only the heart sees rightly: it sees what’s invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Stories speak a language of their own, one that touches our hearts in a way so different from the important needs of our everyday brains. Seeing life through the lens of a story can uplift, clarify and inspire our hearts in the way Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s famous fairy tale for adults The Little Prince puts it, helping us see what’s invisible to the eye. They exemplify the power of imagination at the core of Steiner education.

Stories are therefore a key daily experience for children in a Steiner primary school, and a welcome addition to high school teaching methods. Steiner teachers tell stories from the heart, in person via the spoken word, creating a story presence in the classroom. Each year our Steiner curriculum has recommended stories that are signposts on the journey of human development which each child travels as they grow up. Schools surround their students in living stories from around the world in a nourishing and character-building progression. This talk will share some classics as well as some less well known including Mousedeer and Monkey (Malaysia), The Boy with the Heart of a Lion (San/ Africa) and Turandot: The Ice Princess (China).

For Teachers and School Leadership

1. The Singer and the Song: Classroom management for Steiner teachers

We’ve all heard poor singers ruin great songs, and by the same token, a great singer can make even Jingle Bells sound pretty good. The Steiner curriculum is our song, but on its own, it’s not enough. We need to be great singers to do it justice. Becoming a Steiner teacher is a path of both outer professional and inner personal growth. This dual path gives us tools to ensure our classrooms are well managed, harmonious and creative human communities. This practical session will look at a teacher’s toolkit of classroom skills and practices inspired by Dr Rudolf Steiner’s vision of teaching.

2. Steiner Teaching Rounds: Developing a template for professional observations

There is now substantial research-based evidence that a powerful tool for improving our work as teachers is observing other teachers, being observed ourselves, and sharing our peer observations in a collaborative conversation. We learn from each other, which is of course the basis for collegial work in a Steiner school. This session presents a structure for Steiner school lesson observations that ensures the teaching rounds are professional and not just personal, while at the same time fostering personal creativity and artistry.

3. Main Lesson Method: Big Ideas, Deep Learning

A general session for teachers covering what is unique about the Main Lesson method and how to build it. Main Lessons are called “main” because they look at Big Ideas in a focused manner at the start of the day: they are the main game. All living things live in rhythm, and a living learning needs to be rhythmical as well. We are all fundamentally visual learners, and forming inner images is core to deep learning. We will look in detail at the rhythms of main lesson learning, the imaginations of learning, and contemporary research that supports our approach.

4. Cosmos and Classroom: A Guide to Meditation for Teachers and School Leaders

The teacher’s inner life is a potent element in any classroom, affecting not just the delivery of lessons but also the soul life of the children. An active inner life can also be a profound benefit fo school leaders, providing a source of soul strength for the leadership and the community.

There are specific meditations suggested by Dr Rudolf Steiner, and others which have emerged from generations of practice, that support and enhance all aspects of a teacher and leader’s work. This workshop will explore how building a rich and active inner life can bring higher elements into both the classroom and the whole school, as well as supporting the personal and professional wellbeing of teachers and school leaders.