Education Faculty Books

Follow

• 

  Leadership development : change from the inside out

  Torin Finser PhD

  A leader is like an orchestra conductor, setting the tempo but knowing that real music will arise only when each member is playing the appropriate instrument and the right part.

  This book is for leaders and administrators in Waldorf schools, Camphill communities, farms, clinics, and other not-for-profit initiatives. The themes are broad―personal, interpersonal, and organizational―and intended to stimulate discussion and awareness in a way that promotes self-reflection that leads to both inner and professional growth. In the end, we are servant–leaders, doing what needs to be done for the sake of real human beings in our care. We need the tools and insights vital to accomplishing our highest ideals. Leadership is not just a job but also a calling.

• 

  Nature preschools and forest kindergartens : the handbook for outdoor learning

  David Sobel MEd

  Environmental education expert David Sobel joins with a variety of colleagues to share their experiences and steps for creating a successful forest kindergarten program. Nature Preschools and Forest Kindergartens walks you through the European roots of the concept to the recent resurgence of these kinds of programs in North America.

  Going well beyond a history lesson, these experts provide the framework to understand the concepts and build a learning community that stimulates curiosity and inquisitiveness in a natural environment. This helpful guide provides the curriculum, ideas, and guidance needed to foster special gifts in children. It also gives you the nuts and bolts of running a successful nature preschool business, such as potential obstacles, staff and curriculum design, best practices for success, site and facility management, and business planning.

• 

  Guided self-study : Rudolf Steiner's path of spiritual development

  Torin Finser PhD

  First, one might ask: Why not just read the first three books? After all, Rudolf Steiner wrote them in such a way that the very act of reading them can awaken new faculties. Who could ever duplicate that? It might even seem presumptuous to select passages from books that were constructed by an initiate. To those who have these and other objections, I have the following response: My hope is that the pages in this book serve as an invitation, so that those who work with this material will then be motivated to go to the original texts and work with them more intensively. —Torin Finser

• 

  Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Recover in School Libraries: Creating a Safe Haven

  Christie Kaaland

  "When disaster strikes, school librarians can play a key role in keeping kids safe. This is the only book written specifically to provide school librarians with emergency preparedness and recovery tools as well as curricular tie-ins."-- Provided by publisher.

• 

  A second classroom : parent-teacher relationships in a Waldorf school

  Torin Finser PhD

  What does a healthy, successful school look like? Is it all about measurable outcomes, test scores, and pass/fail grades set by the government? Can learning be quantified in short-term measurements or does real learning take years to manifest in a career or biography? All seem to agree that a healthy school is also a community and that community depends on the quality of relationships―chiefly the relationships among students, teachers, and parents.

  This book features a comprehensive examination of the parent–teacher relationship in all its dimensions, from parent evenings and conferences to communication, conflict, and the life-cycle of parent involvement in their school.

  In between the chapters on practical advice are sections that consider the issues from a deeper, spiritual dimension. This book is intended to stimulate conversation, self-reflection, and relational practices that awaken community life in and around our schools.

• 

  Facilitating authentic learning, grades 6-12 : a framework for student-driven instruction

  Laura Thomas

  There's no doubt about it: the Common Core has us scrambling. With all the pressure to accelerate instruction, how can we possibly find the time to encourage students to do some serious thinking? For Laura Thomas, the answer couldn't be clearer: through constructivist, experiential teaching methods. In fact, constructivist teaching is the single-best way to nurture the higher-order thinking so central to the Common Core. Fusing the practical with the theoretical, Thomas offers a clear path for facilitating real understanding and real skill-building within a community of learners. Grade 6-12 teachers will learn how to: Plan learning experiences that teach content and process at the same time; Assess students' development of 21st-century skills; Coach students to do the hard work of authentic learning - without leaving them to flounder; Teach reflection techniques that help students process their experiences and learn from mistakes. Featuring easy-to-follow graphics, sample lessons, and tools from practicing teachers, Facilitating Authentic Learning is an immediately practical resource that both beginning and veteran teachers can put to work in their classrooms.

• 

  Initiative : a rosicrucian path of leadership

  Torin Finser PhD

  Torin Finser takes on some of our contemporary challenges and proposes new solutions. Rather than simply “kicking the can down the road,” as often happens with issues such as sovereign debts, Middle East conflicts, and environmental issues, Finser calls for individual initiative. Drawing on a variety of rich cultural and spiritual traditions, he makes the case for social change that begins within. To do so, one must first access resources that support initiative and innovation. Key questions discussed in this book include:

  • How is it possible to live a spiritual life in our materialistic age?
  • Can an individual person still make a difference?
  • How can we use a whole-systems approach to innovation?
  • How can planetary wisdom help us find appropriate leadership styles?
  • What are the inner conditions needed to work with the transcendent Self?
  • In the swirl of multi-tasking, how can we find moments of solitude and reflection?

• 

  Wild play : parenting adventures in the great outdoors

  David Sobel MEd

  When David Sobel’s children were toddlers, he set out to integrate a wide range of nature experiences into their family life, play, and storytelling. Blending his passion as a parent with his professional expertise, he created adventures tailored to their developmental stages: cultivating empathy with animals in early childhood, exploring the woods in middle childhood, and devising rites of passage in adolescence. This book is Sobel’s vivid and moving memoir of their journey and an inspiring guide for other parents who seek to help their children bond with the natural world. As we share this family's experiences, we observe how wild play in nature hones a sense of wonder, provides healthy challenges, and nurtures Earth stewardship—and we share Sobel’s joy as his children, Eli and Tara, grow into earthbound, grounded young adults.

  Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods identified the urgent problem of “nature deficit” in today’s children, sounding the alarm for parents, educators, and policy makers. Wild Play is a hopeful response, offering families myriad ways to blaze their own trails; it should become another classic in this field.

• 

  Place- and Community-Based Education in Schools (Sociocultural, Political, and Historical Studies in Education)

  David Sobel MEd and Gregory A. Smith

  Place- and community-based education – an approach to teaching and learning that starts with the local – addresses two critical gaps in the experience of many children now growing up in the United States: contact with the natural world and contact with community. It offers a way to extend young people’s attention beyond the classroom to the world as it actually is, and to engage them in the process of devising solutions to the social and environmental problems they will confront as adults. This approach can increase students’ engagement with learning and enhance their academic achievement.

  Envisioned as a primer and guide for educators and members of the public interested in incorporating the local into schools in their own communities, this book explains the purpose and nature of place- and community-based education and provides multiple examples of its practice. The detailed descriptions of learning experiences set both within and beyond the classroom will help readers begin the process of advocating for or incorporating local content and experiences into their schools.

• 

  Childhood and nature : design principles for educators

  David Sobel MEd

  Public discussions of global climate change and other threats to the planet are making children more aware of environmental issues. As increasing numbers of kids come to school wishing to take action, educators want to know how to teach in a way that fosters a love of nature and an understanding of the complexity and seriousness of these issues.

  In Childhood and Nature, noted educator David Sobel makes the case that meaningful connections with the natural world don't begin in the rainforest or arctic, but in our own backyards and communities. Based on his observations of recurrent play themes around the world, Sobel articulates seven design principles that can guide teachers in structuring learning experiences for children. Place-based education projects that make effective use of the principles are detailed throughout the book. And while engaged in these projects, students learn language arts, math, science, social studies, as well as essential problem-solving and social skills through involvement with nature and their communities.

  The pressures of test preparation, standards, and curriculum frameworks often reduce the study of nature and the environment to a set of facts and general concepts. However, as Childhood and Nature demonstrates, linking curriculum with an engagement in the real world not only provides students with the thinking skills needed for whatever test comes their way, but also helps them grow into responsible citizens and stewards of the earth.

• 

  Organizational integrity : how to apply the wisdom of the body to develop healthy organizations

  Torin Finser PhD

  All around us, we see living systems in plants, animals, and human beings. Our environment is alive, vibrant, and full of innate wisdom. Even the stars and planets speak in the language of ancient folklore to those who have ears to hear. Our very lives depend on this interdependence and on the myriad connections that surround us. Nonetheless, many people experience organizations as inert, bureaucratic, inflexible obstacles to innovation and human initiative. People have struggled for years under the weight of apathy in organizations such as large school systems, corporations, and government agencies such as FEMA.

  Organizational Integrity attempts to reclaim and reconcile organizational dynamics with living systems. The wisdom found in human organs, minerals, planets, and even sacred geometry is used to reinvent organizations. Organizations are supposed to serve, and their forms and structures should mirror the living systems of those who have come together with common purpose. We need to change our ideas of organizations and establish a new paradigm so that future organizations will be worthy of the people in them.

  Dr. Finser makes the case that we need a new ecology of organizations, and that now is time for a new revolution that creates dynamic, living organizations by the people and for the people. Moreover, he shows us how to achieve this seemingly impossible task by “organ-izing” organizations. Just as democracy has transformed much of the world, through the genius of the human body we can transform organizations into living systems that serve and protect human interests.

  Here is a truly unique approach to the age-old process of bringing people together in healthy, effective organizations to better the world we live in.

  Contents:

  • Part I: Foundation Studies in Anthroposophy
  • The Complete Human Being
  • Beyond Memories
  • Vocation
  • The Long Journey
  • Part II: Organs and Organ-izations
  • Heart Knowledge
  • The Kidney
  • The Liver
  • The Spleen
  • The Lungs
  • Dual Organs
  • Corpus Callosum and Other Matters
  • Part III: Other Aspects of Human Physiology
  • Is there a Skeleton in your Closet?
  • Salt, Mercury, Sulfur
  • Sense Perception: Eye and Ear
  • Part IV: Leadership
  • Testing Our Metal as Leaders
  • Planetary Influences
  • The Geometry of Groups
  • Systems Thinking
  • Part V: Healthy Organ-izations
  • What is a Healthy Organ-ization?
  • The Consultation Process
  • The Lily and the Rose
  • Appendices

• 

  Silence is complicity : a call to let teachers improve our schools through action research--not NCLB

  Torin Finser PhD

  Standards set by the federal government : who has been left behind? -- Back off, big brother! -- Introduction to research -- Perceptions of obstacles to teacher research -- Reinventing research : new concepts, new approaches -- Why do research? -- Seeing, feeling, finding your question -- Thoughts on research methods -- Organizing a research project -- Sharing research -- A collaborative model for teacher research -- Why do research (revisited) -- Research as teacher empowerment.

• 

  Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities

  David Sobel MEd

  "Through academic research, practical examples, and step-by-step strategies drawn from classrooms throughout the United States, Sobel celebrates teachers who emphasize the connection of school, community, and environment. 'Place-Based Education' uses the local community and environment as the starting place for curriculum learning, strengthening community bonds, appreciation for the natural world, and a commitment to citizen engagement."--Publisher's website.

• 

  In search of ethical leadership : if not now, when?

  Torin Finser PhD

  Recently, a chasm has opened between many of our leaders and those who work for them. We have witnessed the sacrifices of airline workers and the unconscionable compensation of top executives; the ideals of Olympic Games and the conduct of certain committee members; the sacrament of religion and the priests who abused the sanctity of the human body; the needed services of United Way and their extravagant executive “perks”; and hopes for a democratically fair system versus the 2000 presidential election.

  The values of hard work, inalienable rights, fairness and public service held by most Americans is often lacking in our leaders. An ethical chasm has opened up in our midst, and unless we do something, our future will fall victim to our inadequacies. Our standing in the world in years to come will depend less on our military might, and more on our moral strength.

  We need to begin a united search for ethical leadership. As we take Torin’s journey of discovery with him, we see the roots of this loss of ethical leadership and begin to understand that there is a way out of this situation―by applying the spiritual principles of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science. In Search for Ethical Leadership is grounded with practical tools that offer us real hope for the future of ethical leadership. Contents:

  • The Leadership Challenge
  • Children & Ethical Leadership
  • Character Development
  • Historical Considerations
  • Practical Aspects
  • Inner Dimensions, or Ethics of the Heart & Soul
  • Sun and Moon
  • The Templars
  • The Hidden Temple

• 

  Children's special places : exploring the role of forts, dens, and bush houses in middle childhood

  David Sobel MEd

  From the ages of five to twelve, the middle years of childhood, young people explore their surroundings and find or construct private spaces. In these secret places, children develop and control environments of their own and enjoy freedom from the rules of the adult world. Children's Special Places enters these hidden worlds, reveals their importance to children's development and emotional health, and shows educators, parents, and other adults how they can foster a bond between young people and nature that is important to maturation.

• 

  School renewal : a spiritual journey for change

  Torin Finser PhD

  As a result of today's crisis in education, people are beginning to realize that schools involve far more than providing children with knowledge and skills. Schools are communities and, like all communities, may be healthy or unhealthy. School Renewal addresses the problems and challenges of a school community. Through the use of fairy tales, myths, and the personal experience of Waldorf education, Torin Finser describes how both teachers and parents can come to grips with common problems such as burnout, interpersonal conflicts, and the traps of routine. Most important, the author stresses that an educational community must come to terms with the many unseen dimensions of each individual. He shows how these little-understood aspects of the mind can be cultivated and nourished to keep the school and education alive. School Renewal does not offer formulas and slapdash solutions. Rather, it encourages a whole new way of thinking about education and personal growth - for children and for the adults who care about them. "...if one wish could be granted me on behalf of school renewal, I would ask for significant improvement in the quality of sleep afforded to parents and teachers. No other change has the potential to do more good than simply eliminating the state of chronic exhaustion found by the end of the week in most schools." - from Amazon.com

• 

  Mapmaking with children : sense-of-place education for the elementary years

  David Sobel MEd

  The current crisis in geography education has spawned several new books on mapmaking, many of which advocate either recitation and drill or a conceptual top-down model that ignores children's interests. Mapmaking with Children presents an inspired alternative. Maintaining that there is no substitute for hands-on experience, David Sobel places the initial emphasis on local projects--projects that begin in students' own backyards and communities, projects that provide a sense of place.

  As Sobel explains, "In the beginning, children's maps represent their experiences of beauty, secrecy, adventure, and comfort. With these affective endeavors as a foundation, I then gradually start to focus on scale, location, direction, and geographic relationships. The development of emotional bonds and cognitive skills needs to go hand in hand in my approach to developmentally appropriate social studies and geography." To that end, his book identifies each stage of development, presenting relevant theoretical issues and several appropriate projects.

  In the beginning, students stay close to home, mapping their known world. Gradually, they move on to their neighborhood, developing a sense of place, scope, and perspective. Eventually, once students are older, they explore the nation, the world, even the solar system, creating raised relief maps and contour maps to develop visual literacy and spatial reasoning skills. Vivid illustrations of the students' work are provided throughout to let you observe each stage of development.

  Mapmaking, as Sobel uses it, has relevance across the curriculum. In addition to appealing to social studies teachers, this book will be of interest to science teachers, language arts teachers, and math teachers looking for new ways to invigorate the curriculum.

• 

  Beyond ecophobia : reclaiming the heart in nature education

  David Sobel MEd

  Beyond Ecophobia speaks to teachers, parents, and others interested in nurturing in children the ability to understand and care deeply for nature from an early age. This expanded version of one of Orion's most popular articles includes descriptions of developmentally appropriate environmental education activities and a list of related children's books.

• 

  School as a journey : the eight-year odyssey of a Waldorf teacher and his class

  Torin Finser PhD

  School as a Journey is a lively, colorful, absorbing account of one Waldorf's teacher's journey with his class through the curriculum from first through eighth grades. A moving story, told in a straightforward, anecdotal, humorous style, it is and excellent introduction to what goes on inside the classroom of a Waldorf school. School as a journey was written with both parents and educators in mind. Filled with pedagogical gems, it will be an invaluable resource for understanding the practical implications of Rudolf Steiner's in sight into child development. Extensively documented, it can serve as a study text for anyone wishing to go deeper into the works of Rudolf Steiner and others experienced in Waldorf education.