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“The programs created by Shakespeare & Company provide examples of excellence in professional development, teaching, and learning to be studied and adapted by other artist-teachers, classroom teachers, and teacher-trainers.” – Stand and Unfold Yourself, a two-year study by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Shakespeare & Company’s long-developed techniques awaken the emotional, imaginative, and physical dimensions of the text. Teachers learn appropriate strategies to help students experience the power and beauty of Shakespeare’s language, and to engage with the texts in deeper and more personal ways. Brought back to the classroom and rehearsal rooms, these approaches engage students’ own multiple intelligences, enabling a more passionate, personal, and comprehensive experience of the characters and understanding of the plays.
Designed to help Teachers, Directors, and Teaching Artists create dynamic, engaging learning experiences of Shakespeare in the classroom and on the stage, participants in this program are eligible for Professional Development points.
These workshops are designed by Shakespeare & Company’s Director of Education Kevin G. Coleman. Other master teachers, actors, and directors from the Company join the faculty to help participants to experience, and to develop their own dynamic and engaging learning experiences of Shakespeare in the classroom and on the stage.
These Workshops offer ways to create dynamic and engaging learning experiences of Shakespeare in the classroom and on the stage.
Content includes:
- The most effective methods for freeing both students’ and teachers’ creativity, and for building playful and emotionally safe and intellectually rigorous classrooms.
- An organic and engaging experience of the rhetorical structure inherent in the verse, and a way of presenting it to students that is liberating and exciting; more about Shakespeare’s rhetoric, less about scansion.
- Ways of approaching and presenting the different types of comic characters, clowns and fools, and comic moments in the most often presented plays.
- Ways of effectively managing the presentation of physical violence in Shakespeare’s plays tracing the journey from shaming incidents to the resulting violence, to entire battle scenes. Responsible ways of exploring the violent parts of the stories, and appropriate ways of presenting violence.
- Profound ways for students to meet Shakespeare on multiple levels that create deep, personal meanings for students and teachers alike.
Each Week-Long Workshop includes:
- Handouts of the strategies and rationale for each exercise and activity.
- Time allotted for observations, questions and discussion.
- Ticket to one Shakespeare production.
- Optional evening performances: other theater offerings (discounted tickets).
- Optional evening classes such as Directing Student Productions and Stage Combat.
- Free evenings to explore the Berkshires (in lieu of optional plays and classes).
On Teaching and Directing Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
This workshop is designed to engage with texts in deeper and more personal ways. It not only offers a new way of approaching Shakespeare in classrooms, but also practical, structure-based methodologies and techniques for the rehearsal room. These approaches engage students’ own unique learning patterns and multiple intelligences, enabling a more comprehensive conversance with the plays. Students and teachers alike have discovered new ways of experiencing through this work, which changed and evolved over 40 years.
Six-day Professional Development Workshops
Dates coming soon!
Each workshop includes:
- 36 hours of Professional Development credits.
- Handouts of the strategies and rationale for each activity.
- Tickets to main stage shows at Shakespeare & Company.
- Optional evening classes, such as Directing Student Productions, Stage Combat, and much more.
- Limited Housing is available upon request through the generosity of our Volunteer Company. This helps offset the high cost of housing in the Berkshires during the summer months.
Tuition: $900
Please contact Kirsten L. Daniel at kdaniel@shakespeare.org with questions.
Professional Development Weekend Workshops with Founding Member & Director of Education Kevin G. Coleman
Learn how to create dynamic and engaging learning experiences of Shakespeare in the classroom and on stage with one of the country’s preeminent Shakespeare scholars, Kevin G. Coleman – two-time Tony Ward-nominee for Excellence in Theater Education and a founding member of Shakespeare & Company.
Dates coming soon!
Weekend Workshops include:
- 13 Professional Development Hours from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon.
- Practical ways to build playful, emotionally safe, and intellectually rigorous classroom experiences.
- On-your-feet explorations of Shakespeare’s text and how to explore it with students.
- Strategies for building an understanding of ways for students to meet Shakespeare on multiple levels: personally, creatively, and intellectually.
- The means to apply this work to text from some of the commonly used plays studied in schools (Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar).
Tuition: $400
Please contact Kirsten L. Daniel at kdaniel@shakespeare.org with questions.
How to Apply
Course Gallery
Tuition for this program is $400 for one weekend workshop and $700 for both workshops.
- Click on the red “Apply Now” button at the top of this page.
- Fill out the Application Form.
- Once you have completed your application and received a written notice of your approval from the Education Department, you may complete the tuition payment via the red “Make a Payment” button.
Please contact Meg Marchione for more information about how to apply for aid at mmarchione@shakespeare.org.
Housing is available for participants who may need it. For more information on housing please contact Kirsten L. Daniel at kdaniel@shakespeare.org with questions.
