Research for Future Pathways in Teacher Education

Research for Future Pathways in Teacher Education

The study on the workload and job satisfaction of Waldorf teachers in Germany has been completed.

Teacher education and continuing professional development, as well as working conditions and teachers’ health, are important factors that influence the quality of teaching. The Institute for Empirical Social Research at Alanus University has now completed a study on the workload and job satisfaction of Waldorf teachers in Germany in collaboration with the University of Düsseldorf. The results were presented for the first time at the international conference “2020 – The Future of Education,” which took place in Vienna on 3–4 March 2011.

Jürgen Peters, research associate at the Institute for Empirical Social Research, provides a brief insight into the study here:

“Since spring 2010, the large-scale survey of Waldorf teachers has been conducted under the direction of Heiner Barz, Professor of Educational Research at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, and Dirk Randoll, Professor in the Department of Educational Sciences at Alanus University. The focus of this study is teachers’ assessment of their profession. More than half of the 222 Waldorf schools in Germany took part in the survey, and around 1,900 questionnaires were returned from the 7,538 teachers contacted. This corresponds to about one quarter of the total population.

In addition to questions on job satisfaction and workload, the extensive questionnaire also covered the following topics: teachers’ communication behavior and collegial cooperation, evaluation and quality assurance, work-related behavior and experience, personal working time arrangements, questions on health status, as well as questions on salary structures and pension provision.”

Empirical research into Waldorf education is a relatively young field of research. However, interest in empirical studies on Waldorf education has grown considerably since the mid-1990s. As early as 2007, Dirk Randoll and Heiner Barz conducted a widely noted study focusing on graduates of Waldorf schools.