Learning
It is the task of the educator to encourage and enable others to learn. We help teachers and teacher educators to develop ways of supporting their students’ learning processes.
The most powerful support for learning are teachers who understand how their teaching affects the learning behavior of their students and who are able to modify and optimize their approach accordingly.
We think that quite often too much emphasis is put on what teachers do – teaching methods, curriculum, and classroom management – without sufficient attention being paid to how the students actually learn.
Hence we want to help educators to direct their attention towards the learning differences of their students and to provide differentiated approaches for different learners.
We believe that learners benefit from assessment for learning that provides them with concrete feedback and suggestions of their next learning steps. Consequently we show educators how to work with various tools for assessment in the interests of their students and in order to improve their own way of teaching.
A community of practice for sustainable teaching and learning
With our new project elewa – e-learning Waldorf – we want to enable teachers to actively engage in ongoing professional development, relate new ideas and suggestions immediately to their everyday work in school and deepen their understanding of sustainable Waldorf education through personal exchange with colleagues from around the world.
Teaching
Teaching includes learning. Teaching means planning, reviewing and researching practice to find out how best to afford learning through participation in practices. These practices may be the practice of learning foreign languages, learning in the arts, humanities and sciences. Each subject and activity in educational institutions provides a way of accessing and understanding the world that the learner experiences as relevant, meaningful, coherent and manageable.
We teach people, not subjects. The subject is a way of being and seeing, being a scientist, being an artist, and becoming, becoming more expert and becoming a fuller and more rounded person.
We understand education as an institutionalized way of becoming a person who is capable of making autonomous judgements and taking responsibility. Within this context, teaching is a skilled artistry that combines the craft of organizing learning with individual creativity and imagination with the aim of providing rich learning situations and engaging the pupils.
We believe that teachers can learn a lot from each other by sharing, reflecting, researching and being creative together. Therefore we put a lot of emphasis on creative doing and active participation in the process of learning to teach and teaching to learn alike.
Coaching
Sometimes we have to take a step back from the flow of our daily work in order to reflect and find new perspectives on what we are doing. We help people with this process by offering a gentle path of developing tools of reflection, contemplation and self-help. This involves us in listening, observing, holding up a mirror and, when asked, offering advice.
We do this through direct contact and talk as well as guided reflections, through visiting people in their work and through giving feedback on lesson plans, students’ work or detailed descriptions of situations. We are quite pragmatic and once we have met, we can also work with you online.