Waldorf said the doctoral program was — save for her first year when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed it online — taught in person. Cleveland and Nashville are 450 miles apart from each other.

“Thankfully, there were direct flights,” she said as she smiled.

Juggling multiple significant commitments is nothing new for Waldorf. Just prior to moving to the area, she and her husband, Alex, became parents, welcoming a son in late April. She said this transition would not have been possible without the strong support of her new school.

“It’s a lot at once. … I feel so fortunate and grateful to be in such a welcoming community of people. This is a really, really special place with people who are kind, have grace and just welcome people in,” she said. “It’s been a really incredible journey to know that I am able to lean on the people around me as I learn this place.”

While new to the school, Waldorf has long been immersed in the school’s mission.

“I have often introduced myself to folks by saying ‘I am new here. I am learning the structures. I am learning the routines.’ But I am very much not new to what we do here. I’m deeply familiar with this form of education and what works within it, and why it works,” she said.

North Country School practices experiential learning. Waldorf explained the approach relies on hands-on and place-based learning, meaning that students engage in a variety of projects beyond and outside of the classroom that teach them to discover knowledge and values that she said are omnipresent.

“This idea that there are learning moments around us all over the place,” she said. “If we can pause, and take our focus and put it on them, that’s part of place-based learning. Being able to tap into not just beautiful surroundings, but the culture that you’re a part of, and help students to make meaning of that.”

Waldorf said this form of learning has recently gained traction across the field of education but is nothing new for the school.

“(It’s) been around since 1938, so this place has been practicing place-based and experiential education way before it was trendy and popular,” she said. “The things we do here are not because they’re trendy and popular but because we know they work.”

Waldorf’s career has centered around connecting knowledge conveyed in the classroom to the world around students. Prior to the Mastery School of Hawken, she taught and became the director of school at the Island School, located on Eleuthera, one of the islands that make up the Bahamas. The school was also steeped in experimental education.

“At the Island School, we were tapped into the local happenings. … Being able to immerse students in festivals, or something that suddenly came out of the blue, like we find out there’s an incredible visitor on the island who can meet with our students,” she said. “For example, this was planned, but there’s a partnership with this incredible organization that had a giant research vessel called ‘The Alucia’ with submarines and helicopters on it, and our students were able to tour it. That’s something you want to cancel the school day for to be able to get kids on there and be able to unpack with them afterward.”

In addition to knowledge, Waldorf was proud of the values instilled in students at the Island School.

“The students would spend the entire semester training for either a four-mile swim or a half marathon. Faculty did it alongside them,” she said. “Students leaned into truly challenging themselves and then supporting every single person who came across that finish line. The kid that got the biggest cheers was the kid who came in last. That sense of community and knowing that the person who crossed the line last is facing the biggest challenge in the moment is powerful,” she said.

Waldorf carries these values forward to North Country School. When asked what students should leave the school with, she was quick to answer.

“It’s being conscientious, responsible and kind citizens,” she said. “What that looks like is them being able to find their version of purpose and success in this world with consideration for their impact on other people and the planet.”

–

A “full circle” move

–

A significant portion of the school’s identity is its working farm that students, faculty and staff maintain. While Waldorf said working on it didn’t amount to “a ton” of her upbringing doing agricultural work, she did grow up on a farm in southeast Michigan.

“I spent a lot of my youth running through patches of cabbage, corn and the surrounding creeks, and just growing up in a really beautiful place,” she said.

This helped to shape her love for the outdoors.

“I am (an outdoors enthusiast) indeed,” she said. “Even though I lived in the Bahamas for six years, and, this tends to surprise people, I love cold weather. That’s probably my hearty nature of being from the Midwest. … My husband and I met in the mountains of California. For our honeymoon, which was more like a life sabbatical, we went to the Patagonia Region of South America for four months. We always said that our goal was to find a place that practices the education that we deeply believe in … and we wanted to be in the mountains. It really feels incredibly full circle to be here now.”

Waldorf said she and her husband, also an educator who is staying home at the moment with their new son, are both endurance trail runners and ice climbers.

–

Finding inspiration

–

Waldorf said she did not originally intend to forge a career in education. She graduated from Michigan State University with bachelor’s degrees in professional writing and anthropology. Although she had plans to be a journalist, she took a position with Teach for America upon graduating college. TFA is a nonprofit organization that recruits recent college graduates to teach for two years in under-resourced districts. This brought Waldorf to Oakland, California.

“Many people’s first year in a classroom is, I would say, dynamic. There’s a lot going on,” she said. “So, I went through that first year, and somewhere along that transition into the second year, I realized that my work felt incredibly purposeful. I kept asking myself questions, and I had an incredibly supportive administrative team. I would ask them questions about ‘how could we do this better’ or ‘what can we do to empower these kiddos who don’t really feel engaged.”

She had a lot of of support, which inspired her as an administrator.

“I like to think about what it looks like, what it feels like, to be supported as a teacher,” she said. “I asked question after question, and quickly it became clear that this was just not an experience in my life, but something that I felt really deeply aligned with and connected to.”

When asked what makes her tick, Waldorf gave two answers: her son and inspiring passion from those around her.

“Seeing when people feel, whether they’re teachers who I’m working with or students or their families, purpose, you can see it,” she said. “When they’re excited about what they’re doing, you relate to the work that you’re doing in an entirely different way. It inspires me to create systems and structures and places where that can be the norm, as opposed to the exception. Those are the moments that I cling to and aim to create more and more of.”