Micheal D’Aleo was the first educator to develop Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom into an approach called “Living Thinking” and apply it to upper-grade Waldorf teaching as a new educational framework.
An accomplished engineer with seventeen United States patents, D’Aleo spent his career as an inventor while searching for an education capable of cultivating the ability to address the problems of the modern world. He found Waldorf education and Tibetan Buddhism in the same week, and both became enduring spiritual sources in his life for more than twenty years.
After completing professional Waldorf training at the Center for Anthroposophy, D’Aleo became a Waldorf middle-school physics and astronomy teacher. At the Waldorf School of Saratoga Springs, he helped establish a high school with a new curriculum and teaching approach that contributed to revisions of high-school curriculum standards in the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America. He has also mentored Waldorf high-school physical-science teachers through the Center for Anthroposophy and served as a guest teacher at teacher-training centers and Waldorf high schools. In 2017, at the invitation of Spring Valley, Lezhi, and Shanghai Fuyuan, he began the “Ladder Program” for Waldorf high-school curriculum training. He has taught at Spring Valley Academy since 2017.