Every parent wants their child to feel safe at school. For students, safety goes far deeper than physical security or procedural rules.

Will My Child Succeed After Waldorf High School? The Research Says Yes.

Choosing the right high school can feel like one of the most significant decisions a family will make in their child’s educational journey.

At our school, we’ve observed that removing smartphones from the school day does more than just eliminate distractions—it rekindles a deeper, more meaningful engagement among students.

Waldorf Education takes a balanced approach, with plenty of time for children to play and explore.

Research shows that hands-on learning is extremely effective for students of all ages, particularly when it comes to science education. Waldorf Education employs an experiential approach in all subjects, especially in science. Students learn through observation and experimentation, rather than just memorizing formulas.

Research from Harvard Graduate School of Education emphasizes the importance of making education joyful. Compared with high-pressure, high-stakes, testing-driven environments, students retain more and process better in happy, lower-stress environments.

Researchers have found that teacher looping is a key component in student success in school and beyond, as highlighted by a recent New York Times article. This practice involves students having one teacher for multiple years, which allows time for teachers to get to know each student personally, to understand their learning style, their strengths and challenges, and how to encourage them to do their best work.

Waldorf education prepares graduates with a range of skills and knowledge for finding creative solutions to complex problems. We achieve that through teaching and learning that is hands-on, project-based, and interdisciplinary.

Waldorf education is an intentionally balanced approach to teaching with the goal of graduating happy, healthy, and resilient young people. We interweave academics, artistic activities, movement and outdoor time in a way that reduces stress and enhances learning.

One of the best scientific predictors for how a child turns out in terms of happiness, academic success, and meaningful relationships is whether adults in their life consistently show up for them. Waldorf teachers strive to see and recognize each of their students, greeting them each morning individually, and working with them over multiple years to build on their unique strengths and meet their individual challenges so they can thrive. 
 

Many employers seek specific skills in their potential employees, such as leadership, effective communication, adaptability, teamwork, and creative problem-solving.

Children learn in many different ways. That’s why it is so important for teachers to bring concepts through multiple senses. In Waldorf schools we teach science through stories as well as outdoors in nature and in the lab.

How would you design an education system that helps students flourish in the face of changes to the nature of work brought on by artificial intelligence? The rise of ChatGPT and other AI large-language models have brought this question to the forefront of parents and educators' minds. Waldorf education is uniquely focused on developing children’s creativity, cultural competency, imagination and original thinking.

With an increasingly competitive college admissions process, grades and test scores are no longer the final deciding factors for students to be accepted into the colleges of their choice. Applicants need to find ways to distinguish themselves from the crowd. Waldorf school graduates bring a unique perspective, set of experiences, and skill set.

Too often, homework can be meaningless busywork that stresses and overwhelms students and their families, crushes creativity, and has little impact on children's future success. In Waldorf education, we take a thoughtful, age-appropriate and balanced approach, where homework is introduced later, and is focused on meaningful assignments that foster creativity and further their understanding.

What happens when learning comes to life outside the classroom?

Earlier this year, Noelle Frerichs, a physics teacher at Rudolf Steiner High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, reached out to us about wanting to get her hands on Waboba Pro Balls for an upcoming classroom experiment she was doing. The experiment would involve throwing balls up in the air to calculate the height of each throw using knowledge of the speed of free fall.

A new poll found that 74 percent of high school students think they’ll have a job in 20 years that hasn’t been invented yet. How do schools prepare students for that future?

Since the 1980’s there has been a double digit decline in the number of kids who say they read for pleasure. What accounts for this? A standardized test-driven shift towards textual analysis, where students increasingly are asked to dissect small and out-of-context segments of text, and where reading aloud and reading entire stories have fallen by the wayside.