The faculty body that runs a Waldorf school without a principal, and whose regular conference Steiner called the soul of the whole school.
The College of Teachers in Anthroposophy is the assembled faculty of a Waldorf school, meeting in regular conference as the body that carries the school's pedagogical life. Rudolf Steiner described it in Human Values in Education (GA 310), the Arnheim lectures of July 1924, calling the teachers' conferences the soul of the whole school and a school of deep psychology rather than an administrative committee. In them the faculty studies individual children and whole classes, treating each class as a living being with its own spiritual structure, so that the college's faculty for psychological perception deepens from year to year. Steiner chose the first members for the Stuttgart school that Emil Molt opened on 7 September 1919 by human individuality rather than by diploma, and he said he looked more closely at a candidate who arrived holding a teaching certificate. Waldorf schools still govern themselves this way, without a principal.
The College of Teachers is what a Waldorf school has instead of a head teacher. Steiner made the faculty itself the school's carrying organ, and gave its regular conference a task no administrator would recognise: to go on studying children, whole classes, and the teachers' own capacity for perception. The conference is where the pedagogy either stays alive or hardens into procedure.
In Steiner's Own Words
Studies such as these, in connection with the classes, form ever and again the content of the teachers' conferences. Thus the content of these conferences does not consist only of the administration of the school, but provides a living continuation of education in the school itself, so that the teachers are always learning. In this way the conferences are the soul of the whole school. One learns to estimate trivialities rightly, to give due weight to what has real importance, and so on. Then there will not be an outcry when here or there a child commits some small misdemeanour; but there will be an awareness when something happens which might endanger the further development of the school. So the total picture of our Waldorf School which has only come about in the course of the years, is an interesting one.
What it Means Today
A Waldorf faculty meeting today is recognisably what Steiner described at Arnheim. The working text for many colleges is Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner, the two-volume English translation of the Stuttgart conference minutes (GA 300a to 300c) that Robert F. Lathe and Nancy Parsons Whittaker prepared for Anthroposophic Press in 1998. Read as a manual, not as history, it shows a college arguing over one boy for an hour, weighing the temperament balance of a class, correcting its own perceptions in front of colleagues.
The practice that carries this forward has a name, the Child Study, or Kinderbesprechung. One child is held by the whole faculty across three consecutive weekly conferences: in the first the teachers describe only what they observed, in the second they characterise, and only in the third does anyone propose a course of action. Schools accredited through the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, founded in 1968, are examined on whether this body actually functions, not on whether it appears in the organisational chart. Contemporary education research reaches for the phrase distributed leadership, set out by James P. Spillane in Distributed Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2006), for schools that spread authority across a faculty rather than one office.
Thalira synthesis: the College of Teachers is the one organ in Steiner's school design whose product is a perception rather than a decision, which is why a faculty that converts its conference into a business meeting has already closed the school Steiner meant, whatever the building keeps doing.
Where to Read More
- Human Values in Education, GA 310
- Find Human Values in Education at SteinerBooks
- Find Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner at SteinerBooks
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