Waldorf schools teach one subject every morning for about four weeks at a stretch, so nothing later in the day erases what was just learned.
Period Teaching and the Main Lesson in Anthroposophy is the Waldorf timetable practice Rudolf Steiner set out in Human Values in Education (GA 310), given at Arnhem in July 1924. The school day opens with a single block of two or three hours, the Main Lesson (Hauptunterricht), taken by one class teacher, and that block stays on one subject for roughly four weeks before the next subject takes its place. Steiner called the resulting stretch a teaching period, in German Epochenunterricht. His argument was practical rather than mystical: a day chopped into religion at eight, gymnastics at nine, history at ten and arithmetic at eleven means each hour blots out the one before it, and the teacher is left chasing results. Continue one subject every morning and the previous day's work is still standing when the new day begins.
Period teaching and the Main Lesson name one arrangement seen from two sides. The Main Lesson is the long first block of the Waldorf morning; the period is the run of weeks that block spends on one subject. Arithmetic runs four weeks, then history takes over. Steiner presented it at Arnhem as the alternative to the hour-by-hour timetable.
In Steiner's Own Words
This is why in the Waldorf School we have what may be termed teaching periods. The child comes into a class. Every day during Main Lesson, which continues for the best part of the morning, from 8 to 10 or from 8 to 11, with short breaks for recreation, he is taught one subject. This is given by one teacher, even in the higher classes. The subject is not changed hour by hour, but is continued for as long as may be necessary for the teacher to get through what he wishes to take with the class. In arithmetic, for instance, such a period might last 4 weeks. Every day then, from 8 to 10 the subject in question is carried further and what is given one day is linked on to what was taught the previous day. No later lesson blots out the one given earlier; concentration is possible.
What it Means Today
Waldorf teachers have kept this arrangement since the first school opened in Stuttgart in September 1919: the class teacher takes the Main Lesson block, carries one subject for a few weeks, then hands the rest of the day to the language, eurythmy and craft teachers, who do work to a timetable. Mainstream schooling later arrived at the same structure independently. In September 1989, Joseph M. Carroll launched a pilot at Masconomet Regional High School in Boxford, Massachusetts, on what he called the Copernican Plan: instead of six or seven short daily periods, students took one or two courses at a time in long daily classes running for weeks. Carroll described it in Phi Delta Kappan in January 1990 and reported its evaluation there in October 1994, citing better grades and fewer dropouts. American block scheduling grew from that work, sixty-five years after Arnhem, with no reference to Steiner in it.
Thalira synthesis: what Carroll measured as a scheduling efficiency, Steiner treated as a condition for memory, since on his reading what a child learns has to be carried overnight by the etheric body, and a subject broken off after fifty minutes is never handed over intact. The practical residue outside a Waldorf school is small: give one subject the first hours of the day, keep it there for weeks, and end each session where the next can pick it up.
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