Vision, Mission and Guiding Principles

Calgary Waldorf School Vision

Our vision is to foster the development of our students through care and respect. We strive to nurture reverence, imagination, creativity, independent thinking, academic excellence, enthusiasm for life, and capacity for life-long learning. As teachers, staff, and parents, we are committed to realizing these qualities in our consciousness and in our daily actions.

Calgary Waldorf School Mission

Recognize and honour the stages of child development as elaborated by Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy, to ensure that these stages inform our pedagogy and curriculum, so that teachers will bring appropriate educational content through appropriate educational methods to their students at the right developmental time.

Provide a full, interdisciplinary educational program that balances and integrates the humanities, sciences, mathematics and world languages, along with visual, musical, dramatic and speech arts, applied practical arts, movement, and athletics, and that fulfils both the Waldorf curriculum and the Alberta Education curriculum.

Create a safe, healthy, respectful, caring, and welcoming school environment for all members of our school community.

Foster the development of students’ self-confidence and self-responsibility, in order that they can create and take opportunities to fulfil their potential.

Prepare students for their further education beyond our school by helping them become adaptable to different teaching and learning styles and expectations.

Ensure observable and measurable progress and excellence in student achievements and in teacher and staff performance.

Create for everyone who works in the school an environment in which each person is supported and able to do his or her best work, and is given opportunities for ongoing professional development; foster the continual growth and development of teachers and staff, within an active and collegial learning community.

Raise awareness in all members of our school community of the importance of the capacities for moral, spiritual and ethical values and reverence for life and nature, in the education, development and upbringing of children.

Encourage and facilitate the active and meaningful involvement of the parent body in the life and work of the school; provide parents with opportunities to learn more broadly and deeply about Waldorf Education and about our school.

Maintain clearly delineated and collaborative governance and leadership structures and practices; maintain financial stability, administrative responsibility, and shared responsiveness to the school community’s needs.

Calgary Waldorf School’s Guiding Principles

Recognition of the spiritual nature of the human being.
We believe all children have a spiritual nature which is nurtured and drawn to consciousness by meaningful content in the curriculum and by teachers and other school community members who uphold universal values such as acceptance, care, compassion, kindness, generosity, diligence, respect, and honesty. We strive to honour, nurture and protect the childhood of our students, to guide them into healthy adolescence, and to help them become fully human in ways that go beyond the simply material aspects of our nature and our world.

Reverence for the spiritual nature in ourselves and in all things.
We seek ways to highlight and bring value to learning in deliberate measures that support children’s openness to awe, wonder and inquiry, through the unique qualities of goodness, beauty and truth, as well as maintain a reverence for life in all its forms. We consider this as work with the spiritual nature of life and phenomena. We recognise this education is entirely non-denominational without connection to any specific religious doctrine.

Social, cultural, and economic inclusion.
We strive to provide an educational program that values the inclusion of families, teachers and staff from diverse social, cultural, religious, ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds.

Education of the whole child.
We strive to nurture the healthy, timely development of the whole being of the child: the willing or doing (hands), the feeling (heart), and the thinking (head). We impart an engaging, enlivened and balanced curriculum that challenges our students academically, artistically, and physically. It is not just what the child learns in facts and concepts that measure success, but the care, effort and thoughtfulness embedded in the learning processes and products that bring value and meaning to the child’s experiences.

The uniqueness of each child.
We aim to assist children to make the full use of their innate qualities, their skills, talents, ranges of abilities and unique potential, while empowering them to be proactive in their environment and adaptive to change. We seek to develop identifiable skills while nurturing each child’s capacity for living fully in whatever future unfolds for her or him.

The teacher as mentor, role model, and guardian.
Our teachers strive to teach with moral imagination, make use of their emergent creative skills and talents, and be active researchers and learners in the subject areas they teach. In teaching the same Class of children for longer cycles of time, our teachers have greater opportunities to become aware of and foster each child’s deepest and essential being.

Community.
The school serves as a community in which children benefit from teachers, staff and parents striving together to support education and learning. We also strive toward sound, socially-conscious practices for stewardship of our environment and for serving the wider world outside our school.

Integrating the philosophical and the practical.
Decision-making is guided by practical and philosophical principles: we respond to our social, cultural, physical and economic environment, and we emphasize teamwork and consensus-building.