Columbia College Features Waldorf Education as part of its Fall Faculty Development Workshops

Friday, January 2013

Pictured are workshop organizers:
Mary Felice, Associate Chair & Professor of the Department of Arts, Entertainment, & Media Management (AEMM), Carol Triggiano, CWS Faculty & Workshop Presenter, Terri Lonier, Assistant Professor, AEMM.

This past Fall, Chicago Waldorf School was invited to speak at a faculty education workshop sponsored by the Department of Arts, Entertainment, and Media Management at Columbia College.

As a featured presentation in a series of lectures and faculty workshops that were hosted at The Center for Innovation in Teaching Excellence the speakers included educators from Waldorf, Montessori, Piven Theater and other local institutions. This series discussed strategies for enriching the classroom experience and developing effective methods for delivering curriculum and inspiring student learning.

Carol Triggiano, current CWS eighth grade teacher and former Chair of the College of Teachers, led a workshop that described the Waldorf approach. Discussions included models of imaginative storytelling and the group examined the value of students illustrating and authoring their own workbooks as pedagogical tools that effectively aid creative and active learning.An overview of the history and tenets of Waldorf education was covered, which led to an active discussion about the benefits of a measured approach to technology and media in the classroom.

The educational value of these Waldorf principles are gaining more adherents and widespread acceptance as we see increased exposure in mass media and the ongoing publication of supportive studies in academic and professional journals of psychology and child development. This analysis and contemporary discourse on “how we learn” was very germane to this audience of academics and administrators.

In discussion and Q&A sessions, these approaches to engaging curriculum were analyzed in the context of elementary, secondary and collegiate classroom environments. Many of the Columbia College faculty enthusiastically reflected on the ways that they engage active learning in their classrooms and shared some of their challenges. The active storytelling model had great appeal and Columbia faculty pledged to adopt some of these models, along with student-authored class “viewbooks,” into their curriculum and classroom preparations.

Inset Photo: Carol speaks afterwards with Dawn Larsen, Associate Professor & Director, Graduate Studies in Entertainment Law, Oral Communication and Public Speaking for Managers, Columbia College.