Every summer, the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training offers a number of professional development and renewal through the arts programs open to the greater Waldorf community and the public. If you would like to receive our newsletter with news and updates on our upcoming programs and events, please fill out the form on our Contact page.
Summer Program 2025
Each year, we invite lead presenters to share insights on a theme of current relevance for teachers in Waldorf schools. In addition, our team of experienced teachers will share their knowledge with each grades track, ensuring you receive a wide range of perspectives and practical support. Over the course of the week, an understanding of the essential developmental motifs and learning intentions for each grade will be built to anchor you in your year.
In-person on the beautiful Marin Waldorf School campus in San rafael, CA
Professional Development Courses for Practicing Teachers
Early Childhood Teacher Rejuvenation
June 16-20 | 8am-4pm PT
Sowing Seeds for Literacy
With Anjum Mir and Kate Hammond
Children unfold capacities for learning in an environment that supports their natural growth. How do we provide opportunities for cognitive learning in early childhood settings? Enlivening activities in the classroom develop persistence, focus, and a ripeness for knowledge. During this week together, we will consider what the foundation for literacy is and how we can build such capacities in our day-to-day work.
Singing with Christiaan Boele, Speech with Christine Burke, and Eurythmy with Karen Gallagher.
Anjum Mir is a mother of four, and is currently School Co-Coordinator at Westside Waldorf School in Los Angeles. She is on the board of WECAN and several other education-focused organizations and is involved in teacher education and training. Anjum has degrees in Journalism and Cultural Anthropology from Boston University and in Education from University of Texas at Austin, and has trained in Waldorf Early Childhood Education.
Kate Hammond is a Waldorf alumna and has a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. She graduated from Emerson College with a certificate in Waldorf Teacher Training, specializing in Early Childhood Education, and has taught kindergarten, preschool, infants, and parent-child classes. She is a Level 3 trainer in Spacial Dynamics®. She is the intrigued mother of two teenage boys.
Cost: $450
Click This Link to Register Now
Grades 1-5 Teacher Rejuvenation
June 16-20 | 8am-4:30pm PT
Finding Gold – Keeping Afloat!
Exploring new paradigms for health and vitality in class teaching.
With Warren Lee Cohen
This year, we turn our focus toward the need to reassess what we can do to keep ourselves and our children healthy. In a world of overwhelm and distraction, where do we find our own source of strength and abundance so that we may support the needs of today’s children? What are the Waldorf tools and practices that lie forgotten at the bottom of our backpacks that we can renew and draw upon?
We are very happy to have Warren Lee Cohen again this summer leading our lower grades week. Warren will have just graduated his 8th Grade class and will share his experience of self-care, inner work, and shaping the life of the class to bring sanity and stability to the young child.
He will share his years of experience both as a class teacher and as a former director of the Waldorf teacher training program in Toronto, Canada.
Our team of experienced teachers will share their knowledge with each grades track, ensuring you receive a wide range of perspectives and practical support to help you know where to dig and how to stay afloat in your coming year.
Grades Track Teachers: Warren Lee Cohen, Ganga Sivasankaran, David French, Kristine Deason, Ken Smith.
Singing with Christiaan Boele, Speech with Christine Burke, and Eurythmy with Karen Gallagher.
Cost: $450
Click This Link to Register Now
Grades 6-8 Teacher Rejuvenation
June 23-27, 2025 | 8am-4:30pm
Image from Whistler Waldorf School
How Can I Truly Know the World?
Experiential Learning for the Developing Adolescent
This year, we turn our attention to the importance of experiential learning and the ways it can support middle school students in finding their feet on this earth, building an inner safety net, and discovering pathways to manage the overwhelming influences of screens, social media, and AI.
Paolo Carini will guide the theme of the week, focusing on the development of manual competence for the contemporary student and the fundamental values provided by experiential learning. It is true that we only really know what we have directly experienced in our lives. Building those experiences by engaging in hands-on activities—whether it is making an artistic project, a science project, or a delicious minestrone soup—helps students develop a real sense of manual competence, and with that the confidence to tackle many other challenges, including those that may be considered purely in the thinking realm or in the ethical and social realm. This confidence is deeply nourishing for the soul and is declining dramatically in today’s culture, leading to feelings of helplessness in the face of life’s many challenges.
We are very happy to have Paolo Carini with us again this summer leading our upper grades week. Paolo has taught at the San Francisco Waldorf High School for 28 years and is a longstanding member of the BACWTT faculty. He will share his experiences of guiding young people into lifelong learning.
We have a team of very experienced middle school Waldorf teachers who will share their knowledge with each grades track, ensuring a wide range of perspectives and practical support for the coming year.
Grades Track Teachers: Paolo Carini, Ganga Sivasankaran, David French, Ramona Budrys, Ken Smith
Specialist Arts Faculty: Christiaan Boele (Singing), Christine Burke (Speech), Karen Gallagher (Eurythmy)
Cost: $450
Click This Link To Register Now
Public Workshops
Healing Through Singing III
June 13, 2025 | 5pm-7pm
June 14, 2025 | 9am-4pm
June 15, 2025 | 9am-12pm
Singing maintains our health and widens our view. It integrates all parts of our individual self – body, soul, spirit – and supports us in our normal, daily lives. It is an essential part of physical life on earth life, binding us as communities, peoples, and cultures, creating settings in which everyone can take part.
Singing also connects us to origins beyond time and space, through the essentials of what lies in speech and musical sounds to the immeasurable, unimaginably large cosmos. It touches all cos-mic elements, including pre-birth, death, destiny. When we sing, we connect to origins. Through singing, we expand the circle of our daily life and its materialism, and breathe into wider surroundings and into the future.
Join us for the third part of this singing workshop, intended for anyone seeking to deepen their relationship to the restorative power of tone and to connecting more closely with the life-giving power of singing. The workshop includes work with Werbeck exercises, experience with tone, lecture, discussion, and sessions in Spacial Dynamics. (Attendance at previous years’ workshop and experience with singing not required.)
Course Instructors: Christiaan Boele and Kate Hammond
Christiaan Boele exhibited strong musicianship early in life that was a solid foundation for future study and his life’s work in music. He currently lives in Finland and conducts courses, schooling of the voice sessions, master classes, and choirs around the world. He has been connected to Werbeck singing for over 50 years.
Kate Hammond is a Waldorf alumna and has a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. She graduated from Emerson College with a certificate in Waldorf Teacher Training, specializing in Early Childhood Education, and has taught kindergarten, preschool, infants, and parent-child classes. She is a Level 3 trainer in Spacial Dynamics®. She is the intrigued mother of two teenage boys.
Cost: $300
Click This Link to Register Now
The Art of Veil Painting
June 21-22, 2025 | 9:30am-3pm
Workshop with Clara Schaareman
Veil painting explores the transformative properties of color into form, emerging from the interplay of layers of warm and cool colors. Slowly, layer after layer, form emerges from color atmosphere. The process of creating a veil painting is therapeutic for one’s mind, body and soul.
Carla Schaareman grew up in the Netherlands. She received her BA/MA in fine arts from the Willem de Kooning Academy in the Netherlands in 1990, after having studied at several other art institutions, including the Royal Academy in Den Haag and De Vrije Academie in Den Haag. Until 1998, she worked in her own studio on commissions and on developing her own work. In 1998, Carla and her family moved to California, where she completed her BACWTT teacher training in 2006. Her teaching experience includes three years of printmaking, veil painting, figure drawing, and stone carving at the East Bay Waldorf High School and clay modeling at the Novato Charter School. She has been teaching at the San Francisco Waldorf High School since February 2009 and has been the High School Art Program Coordinator since 2022.
Cost: $250
Click this link to register
The Three Arts of Speech
Saturday, June 28, 2025 | 9am-4pm
Workshop with Christine Burke
Working with the voice leads to richer, more responsive, and creative expression in speech that has a transformational quality about it—both for the listener-receiver and the speech-giver.
This one-day speech intensive is for teachers, teacher trainees, actors, parents, and business people who wish to work with creative forces in the word and enliven the dynamics of speaking in work and everyday life!
Christine Burke, Logodynamics Practitioner & Creative Speech Artist, lives in California. Her passion for words began at a young age and has led to and through theater and English literature, a degree in Linguistics, Waldorf teaching in the US and Sweden, Rudolf and Marie Steiner’s “Sprak Gestaitning,” and the Michael Chekhov approach to acting (in England). Christine is currently teaching Communication Studies at Ventura College. She teaches Creative Speech/Logodynamics privately and in groups, performs, and speaks at workshops and conferences.
