[Michael Soulé]

Hi Michael,
 We are facing the challenges you describe in your post:  “So what do schools do when the faculty is not experienced enough or trained enough or socially adept enough to create such an organ, our insightful board colleague asked?” In our school a large group of young teachers joined us, most of them not (yet) familiar with Waldorf pedagogy. They are now immersed in an intensive mentoring and Waldorf training programme, so this aspect is cared for. However it seems that in Salzburg some parents seem to have a stronger impetus to form a spiritual organ for the school than the faculty (and they are by no means fundamentalists who want to conserve the ‘golden times’). We have some teachers with a very deep and profound connection to Anthroposophy, but all in all it appears to me that a group of parents seems to feel a greater need for actually working together in a spiritual way (where on the teacher side spiritual practice is practised by some on the individual level). I’m very glad that there are small but important initiatives to renew and deepen the collective spiritual core initiated by a teacher as well: for instance a small group of teachers and parents will be meeting during advent to celebrate an Offering Service together in the morning.

Now my perception of the situation here in Salzburg immediately led me to that second thought voiced in the post “when two people meet, one has more capacity than the other to consciously connect with spiritual insight and, to create a harmonious working with the other, must exercise true collaborative leadership in a way that the equality between them and the freedom of each is nourished. Otherwise, without the social capacity, the one with more capacity easily is perceived as arrogant or condescending.” I have noticed a lot of fear in parent-faculty interactions, and I would attribute these feelings  – which then often lead to label the other side as “arrogant” – to this missing quality of collaborative leadership. But how do you grow this kind of leadership if it is not present (maybe because in the past there was overt collegial leadership with covert authoritarian leadership by a small group)? And somehow I feel that the teachers should actually be in charge of the spiritual core of the school, not so much the parents (Steiner described the role of the parents in a very different way than he decribed the role of teachers in the self-government of schools). How can we prepare for that?

By how I’m asking this question in a very practical way. In theory I would imagine that collaborative leadership has a lot to do with enhancing the quality of listening and practicing the art of having a good conversation (preferably a Goethean conversation) together. But do have any practical suggestions to actually make this possible in real life (time and energy constraints)?

Michael, I’d like to thank you for your inspiring and regular posts on these topics. I enjoy reading the literature on self-governance in both English and German, because they do have a different quality. By the way, Michael Harslem is a member of the Akademie for Entwicklungsbegleitung, a network our school is a close member of.

Warm greetings from Salzburg
Barbara Ormsby

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