Waldorf 360

Ashburton, England. Waldorf 360: An ambitious project comes full circle.

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On April 16, 2025, during the International High School Conference in Kassel, the Modern Teacher team hosted the last of the 60 weekly sessions of “Waldorf 360: Global High School Network.” The initiative was born in 2023 out of a breaktime conversation at the World Teachers Conference at the Goetheanum. Adam Dubignon, the principal of Sasana Waldorf School in Malaysia, asked me, “Since you offer online courses for Waldorf teachers who can’t access a training, how about doing something for the High School? In many countries, there is nowhere for secondary school specialists to get any information about the Waldorf concept!”

I pulled in my colleagues Alan Swindell, Amanda Bell (both UK), and David Barham (US), realising that Adam had identified a real problem: while in most countries class teachers can often pick up good tips from their colleagues, High School specialists tend to be quite isolated—they usually are the only experts in their schools on biology, art, or eurythmy, with no-one to ask for didactic advice. So we set about building a truly inclusive and affordable international programme. Karla Neves (Brazil) and Virashni Bharuth (South Africa) joined the core team, and we began to put together a faculty of well-known international experts on the Waldorf approach to High School subject teaching. We asked each of them to host three 90-minute sessions in 20 designated modules that were accessible live from the US (in the mornings) to Singapore (in the evenings). Teachers from other countries could (and did) access the recordings, and the tutorial materials were made available. The number of participants in each session varied between 40 and 120. Altogether, 118 schools and many more individual teachers (from 40 countries) signed up to absorb the advice from the presenters and to work together in weekly interactive sessions, creating international peer networks.

When the programme broke even financially, we could afford to offer the remaining modules for free. The Modern Teacher is a non-profit organisation based in the UK and is well-known for organising successful international online courses such as “Waldorf Direct” and “every child!” In its financial model, every school pays a flat rate and can then allow each teacher to attend. The fee structure is based on the number of pupils, therefore small or pioneering schools pay considerably less. For individuals, the attendance fee is kept very low.

Presenters included established experts such as Wilfried Sommer, Graham Kennish, Michael Holdrege, Ulrike Sievers, and Jamie York. Often modules were shared between hosts from different cultures, allowing for an inclusive, contextual approach (Indrani Banerjee and Amanda Bell on History, Virashni Bharuth on Literature, Kemal Lowenthal and Simon Gillman on Crafts, Mandy Futter on Geography, and Agnes Tan on Work Experience). Arts and movement got equal billing with the “academic subjects”, emphasising the point that all subjects have their role to play in a balanced, holistic approach. An overview of adolescent pedagogy was given at the beginning, which included a rich introduction by Douglas Gerwin and members of the core team.

For the 60th and final session, broadcasted from Wilfried Sommer’s Kassel laboratory, eight presenters were asked to each give a short presentation on “the most important aspect of Waldorf.” Each contribution highlighted a different element of our modern practice, demonstrating that there is a real commitment in our movement to renew and reinvigorate ourselves while both valuing and being nourished by our roots in anthroposophy. The entertaining and inspiring session can be viewed for free on the Modern Teacher YouTube Channel.

The 60 sessions, arranged in 20 subject modules, will now be prepared for offline purchase to be used by schools and individuals in staff training and professional development. Waldorf 360 will continue in 2026, offering sessions on “The Inside View”: approaches that characterise and inform Waldorf practice without being explicit in the curriculum, such as phenomenology, social work, inclusion, contextualisation, media training, and emotional and mental health awareness, to name but a few. Details will be announced in the autumn.

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Image The Waldorf 360 team, Photo: private