Waldorf News

The Cloud Conferences

by Eugene Schwartz

It all began on a chilly spring day in 2010. I answered the phone and heard a mournful voice on the other end.

“Well, the recession has finally caught up with us. Our enrollment projection is so low that the school is cutting funds for professional development this summer. Do you have any lectures on CDs for my grade?”

Over the next few weeks, I was to receive quite a few calls with the same lament: professional development could not be supported by many schools, and salary freezes or cuts made it next to impossible for teachers to pay their own way to a “live” teachers’ conference. I knew that something more than CDs was called for, and I was aware that the transmission of audio and video content over the Internet was dramatically improving in speed and quality. Was the Waldorf Movement ready for a leap into the future, or at least into the 21st Century?

With all this in mind, I devised an “Online Conference” for Grade Four. This first effort consisted simply of my sharing (via my digital recorder) everything that I knew and had experienced about teaching Grade Four. For good measure, I created slideshows of fourth grade student work with commentary so that teachers could see for themselves what their students could create. A video teachers’ guide to the complexities of Grade Four braided form drawing was yet another “first” in this conference.

The popularity of the Grade Four Online Conference led to requests for a Grade Five Conference – and so on — and four years later we are excited to offer a full complement of Online Conferences for Grades 1 through 8. Major contributions to various conferences have been made by Roberto Trostli (video guides to the laboratory sciences), Meg Chittenden (songs for Grades 4 – 7 and video guides to drawing in Grade 7), and Raine Springer (songs and games in Grades 1 – 3). Altogether, the eight Online Conferences contain over 250 hours of content; in their totality they serve as a unique Waldorf teacher’s “encyclopedia/archive” with worldwide accessibility.

In addition, we are presenting innovative Online Conferences for Special Subject Teachers in the Waldorf Grade School. Our hope is to improve the retention of these valuable colleagues by giving them the same foundation in Waldorf pedagogy, child development, and many of the arts that Class Teachers receive in their training.

The Online Conferences are not substitutes for “live” conferences, but rather reinventions of the summer conference altogether. The possibilities offered by this approach are significant:

• Affordability: Online tuitions range from 25% to 50% of the tuitions of equivalent live conferences. There are no other expenses.
• Convenience: Participants create their own 14 day-long schedule, with no disruption of family life or summer plans.
• Transparency: The complete contents of every Online Conference may be viewed online all year long, and samples of lectures and videos from all of the conferences are always available. Participants know exactly what to expect before they begin their fourteen-day access.
• Content and Context: In general, the Online Conferences dedicate significantly more time on every subject than it is possible to spend in a live conference. We are not “Waldorf Lite”! We offer depth as well as breadth, and the integration of Waldorf methodology and Anthroposophy is our most serious commitment. In fact, class teachers who are going through the grades for their third or fourth time are among our most enthusiastic participants.
• Evaluation and Renewal: Although they are pre-recorded, the Online Conferences are by no means written in stone. Every year lectures are revised, new topics are added, more PDFs and external links are made available, and the user interface is improved. (The current Grade Four Conference, for example, is three times longer than the original.)

We urge you to look and listen for yourself.

Class Teachers should go to www.iwaldorf.com/online2014 for full information about dates and registration and a panoply of links to conference contents, sample lectures, and videos.

Special Subject Teachers can learn more about the new conferences meeting their needs at www.iwaldorf.com/specialoverview

We look forward to having you join us this summer!

The images are from slideshows that accompany the conferences.