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.
Jump to:
Rejuvenation Courses for Practicing Teachers
Public Arts Courses
Summer Program 2026
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
Learn more about the area surrounding Marin Waldorf School and local resources for your stay.
Professional Development Courses for Practicing Teachers
Early Childhood Teacher Rejuvenation
June 22-26 | 8am-4pm
Bathing in the Well of Inspiration
with Noelle Thompson and Kate Hammond
In this rejuvenating week, we will take a deep dive into the wellspring of our work—Rudolf Steiner’s indications for Early Childhood teachers. What resources will help us meet the children in the fall? How can we live into the essentials of our work so that our students may inspire us and fill us with the forces we need?
Throughout the week we will play together, move circles, and build a picture of how these principles can shine in the classroom. Our study will center around the pillars of Waldorf Early Childhood teaching. In the afternoons we will make, enliven, and animate with silk marionettes. Come and join us for crafts, study, eurythmy, and speech.
Noelle Thompson has been teaching for over 30 years in “alternative” schools where honoring the whole child and nurturing lifelong learners aligns closely with her personal values. Since 2008, she has been teaching in Early Childhood at Live Oak Waldorf School.
Kate Hammond is a Waldorf graduate and has taught early childhood and grades for over 30 years. She is a parent coach, an adult educator, and a Spacial Dynamics® trainer. Kate is the author of Why Be Screen Free?
Cost: $450
Grades 1-5 Teacher Rejuvenation
June 15-19 | 8am-4:30pm
The Waldorf Teacher’s Journey: Becoming Your Authentic Self in the Classroom
With Jack Petrash
Waldorf education was intended to generate forces of renewal for the children, the teachers, and the whole school. Great faith is placed in the teacher’s ability to be true to themselves and to work out of their own authenticity while being both creative and responsible. Today, we must intentionally reconnect to the inner striving of the teacher that is at the heart of our teaching. Jack will help us to reframe the path of the teacher, which is so needed today.
Our very experienced faculty will collaborate together to build a rich, artistic, informative, and rejuvenating week.
Jack Petrash worked at the Washington Waldorf School for over forty years where he taught four classes from first grade to eighth and mentored and trained teachers. He was the co-founder and director of the Nova Institute and the author of understanding Waldorf Education: Teaching from the Inside Out, Navigating the Terrain of Childhood, and Turning Lead into Gold: The Transformative Alchemy of Waldorf Teaching. His TEDx talk, Preparing Children for the Journey, has been viewed worldwide.
Cost: $450
Grades 6-8 Teacher Rejuvenation
June 22-26 | 8am-4:30pm
Guiding Middle Schools Student Through Adolescence
Adolescence is challenging and navigating middle school requires a new level of intentionality from class teachers. Dealing with physical and emotional changes can take young people, along with their parents and teachers, to their breaking points. If we persist in treating adolescents like children, they will respond with the worst of childlike behaviors. It is then vital for class teachers to evolve alongside their students. As the curriculum heads into more factual, scientific, and academic territory, the class teacher is called to meet the world with objective heart forces and an ability to permeate all the subjects with beauty. The arts, deep truthfulness, and humor all come to the aid of striving teachers in their relationships with teens, as they struggle to find their inner harmony again. It is important that teachers keep a light shining on what is beautiful in humanity and in the natural world.
Our very experienced faculty will collaborate together to build a rich, artistic, informative, and rejuvenating week.
Warren Lee Cohen Warren just graduated his second eighth grade class from Toronto Waldorf School. He has served as a class teacher in the U.S., an adult educator in the U.K., and as Director of Waldorf Teacher Education at RSCT in Canada. His publications include The Waldorf Book of Blessings, Raising the Soul: Practical Exercises for Personal Development, Baking Bread with Children, and his latest book, Celebrate Passover.
Cost: $450
Gardening Teacher Training
June 22-26 | 9am-4pm
Growing Sustainable Children
Gather with other educators to explore K-12 garden, farm, and nature-based education. Curriculum and hands-on skill building will be woven throughout the week. Participants will create their own personalized grade-by-grade curriculum, accompanying manual activities for students, and site plans to help develop their school garden. The course will take place at both the Marin Waldorf School garden (Monday and Friday) as well as Three Springs Community Farm in West Sonoma County (Tuesday-Thursday).
Camping accommodations are available at Three Springs Community Farm, no additional charge, along with use of outdoor kitchen for personal cooking and daily childcare is available. Please bring your own lunch, snack, hat, water bottle, gloves, and work boots.
Willow Summer is the founder of City Slicker Farms and The Berkeley Basket as well as the coauthor of The Essential Urban Farmer. She completed her Waldorf teacher training in 2011 and currently runs Three Springs Community Farm, a biodynamic CSA and educational farm, with her husband.
Ronni Sands was the garden teacher at Summerfield Waldorf School and Farm for 32 years and taught herbal studies, basket weaving, cooking, landscape watercolor painting, and environmental studies. She is now teaching at Three Springs Community Farm. Ronni and Willow are the co-authors of Growing Sustainable Children: A Garden Teacher’s Guide.
Cost: $450
Public Workshops
All materials will be provided.
Tea, coffee and snack will be provided. Please bring your own lunch.
Entering into the World of Light and Darkness
Saturday, June 20, 2026 | 9am-3pm
Charcoal Workshop with Pamela Whitman
Working with the soft and malleable medium of charcoal provides us with a unique, artistic experience. It allows us to become sensitive and creative within the realm of light and darkness, bringing depth, form, and direction to their interplay. This is a special aspect of Anthroposophic artistic therapy and an essential tool that supports the process of the incarnation of our spirit into our earthly body. Through charcoal work, we learn to bridge between these polar opposites and to experience how they can work together in the process of transformation and integration. Through working on our pictures, we work on ourselves. We can find a breathing connection as we explore the appropriateness of different kinds of boundaries.
This workshop is an opportunity to deepen our understanding and experience of light and darkness and explore the possibilities for the use of its healing effects. It is a valuable activity to bring into the turbulent years of the mid-teens through adulthood.
Pamela Whitman, M.A., received her B.S. from MIT, where she studied both science and humanities. She studied Light, Color and Darkness Painting Therapy in Holland and received her certification from the Medical Section at the Goetheanum while also completing her Master’s degree in Human Development. Her career and interests span the fields of science, art, spirituality, consciousness, psychology, healing and education, all of which she incorporates as a therapist, international adult educator, mentor, and painter.
Cost: $175
Holding Earth
Saturday, June 20, 2026 | 9am-3pm
Clay Sculpture Workshop with Margrit Haeberlin
There is no other material quite like clay. When mixed with water to the right amount, it has the perfect softness and resistance that allows us to shape it with our bare hands. It is one of the few natural mineral materials that we can hold in our hands and use our own strength to create sculptural forms.
Clay provides us with deep, inner experiences through the sense of touch. The direct, haptic experience of our skin directly meeting the material world is combined with our forces of creativity and imagination when we engage in the sculpting process. The clay provides the “body” for our ideas and creative formative energy, and allows us to embody our ideas.
In Waldorf education and Anthroposophic artistic therapy, sculpting with clay provides an essential experience of coming into and orienting ourselves into three-dimensional space, of grounding and centering. Through sculpting, we also work on ourselves, bringing inner form.
This workshop is an opportunity to find ourself in sculptural shapes and benefit from their healing effects.
Open to everyone at all levels of experience.
Margrit Haeberlin is a freelance artist, art educator, and faculty member at BACWTT. In 1989, she graduated with a degree in Art and Design from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in Switzerland. She led the design studio for Ruckstuhl AG, following seven years as an independent textile designer creating knitwear. She received her Waldorf teacher training credential from BACWTT in 2010 and taught Early Childhood for 5 years. She was a founding member of the three-year Healing Through Art (HTA) program, graduating in 2025 with a focus in Sculpture. She works with children and adults, runs art workshops, and creates beautiful colored windows for classrooms and therapy rooms.
Cost: $175
Swimming in Color
Saturday, June 27, 2026 | 9am-3pm
Painting Workshop with Ayzin Uludag
Working with watercolor paints on moist paper allows both the colors and the creative process to be fluid and mobile. This is a supportive activity for the artist, allowing time to dream and swim with the colors before they become settled and fixed into defined shapes.
This wet-on-wet technique was developed by Rudolf Steiner and is used in Waldorf schools and in Anthroposophic artistic therapies to bring life into the experience of colors, freeing them from the material, objective world and allowing the soul of the painter to be nourished by their pure energies. This artistic approach brings a healthy, breathing movement into our inner world, which can become hardened and immobile through all of life’s struggles and challenges. When we are moving the paint, we are also moving ourselves and bringing balance, harmony, interest, and integration.
This workshop is an opportunity to dive into color and benefit from its healing effects. Open to everyone at all levels of experience.
Ayzin Uludag has taught Visual Arts in middle and high school at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula and has conducted workshops for parents and teachers since 2018. Upon moving to the USA, she pursued studies in Traditional Chinese Medicine, specializing in Medical Qigong Therapy, and completed her Waldorf teacher training in 2018 with an emphasis on Art. She completed the Healing Through Art program to enrich her knowledge in the light of Anthroposophy and to blend her passion for art with healing. She utilizes a variety of mediums to guide individuals and groups in transformative, therapeutic, and artistic processes.
Cost: $175
Speaking with My Whole Self
Saturday, June 27, 2026 | 9am-3pm
Speech Workshop with Christine Burke
Through our speech, we impact the world and those around us. Our inner life flows outwards over our vocal cords on our breath, influencing those around us. In earlier times, people had a deeper feeling for the power and importance of the word to do good or to do harm. Today, real communication through the human voice is being undermined. We are losing both the capacity to carry our inner world out on the waves of our words as well as the ability to perceive the other and their inner world through our senses.
Working with speech activities will enliven and strengthen the organs of speech and the ability to carry living pictures, clear thoughts, and forces of the heart in our words. Teachers who use their voice everyday in the classroom will benefit from this care for speech and learn to nourish their students through enlivened descriptions and storytelling.
This workshop is an opportunity to find your voice and is open to anyone who is interested. All levels of experience are welcome.
Christine Burke currently teaches Communication Studies at Ventura College and Logodynamics/The Arts of Speech privately, in groups, at workshops, trainings, and here at BACWTT. 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 Gestaltung,” the Michael Chekhov approach to acting, and an MA in Communication Studies focusing on Communication Education, Classical, and Performance Studies.
Cost: $175
Wood Is Good: Woodcarving Workshop
June 29-July 10, 2026 | 10:30am-2:30pm
Seven Planetary Bases With Patrick Marooney
Join Patrick Marooney this summer for the unique opportunity to carve one of the seven planetary bases from the Goetheanum building. These forms were part of the incredible artistic and cosmic temple that Rudolf Steiner designed and built in the early 1900s. At the same time that the first world war was waging in the trenches of northern France, people gathered together in Switzerland from many nations to create a building that embodied peace and human evolution.
This is an opportunity to slow down and focus on one thing, understand the character and grain of wood, learn how to handle and sharpen the tools and, chip by chip, carve out something special. Woodcarving by hand takes time. This course is designed to allow you to enjoy multiple days to complete a piece. You have the option to attend for 5 days for a quicker project or for 10 days for a longer project. The course is ideally suited to people who can come to the Marin Waldorf School campus each day. The woodwork room will be open Monday-Friday from 10:30am to 2:30pm (with a lunch break) for 2 weeks.
Patrick is a master carver and has a lifetime of experience with wood. This is a great opportunity to learn from him.
Patrick Marooney met Waldorf education in 1974 through two Waldorf teachers who had a puppet theatre collapse on them mid-show. He trained full time for two years at Rudolf Steiner College before taking a class through the 8 grades at Eugene Waldorf School from 1984-1992. He was the woodworking teacher at EWS for 23 years and also taught core courses with Waldorf Teacher Education Eugene for 25 years. Since 1997, he has taught sciences, form drawing, and geometry at BACWTT.
Cost for 5 days: $195 | Cost for 10 days: $375
