Professional Development Workshops

These workshops are offered each year at Shakespeare & Company at the height of our summer performance season.

August 2019 Week-Long Workshop – specific dates to be announced soon!

These workshops offer:

• 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 theatre offerings (discounted tickets)
• Optional evening classes: Directing Student Productions; Stage Combat
• Free evenings to explore the Berkshires (vs. optional plays, optional classes)

“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. Further, they provide powerful evidence that on the highest levels of literacy, in the realms of social and personal growth and development, and in the development of high-order thinking skills, the arts provide an ideal setting for multi-faceted and profound learning experiences.”
—From “Stand and Unfold Yourself,” a two-year study conducted by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (Project Zero, Steve Seidel et al.) and sponsored by the GE and MacArthur Foundations; the study was published in “Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts On Learning.”

Comments from past participants:

“This workshop is exceptional…what you take away from it will enrich yours and your students’ lives way more than what you gave up to get there.” —Sharon Rae Paquette, Advice to the Players, New Hampshire

“Honestly, it was one of the best workshops of my 27 years of teaching and directing. I can’t wait to play!” —Dawn Gunderson, Moorhead High School in South Moorhead, Minnesota

“If you teach drama – Shakespeare or otherwise – this workshop will change your teaching forever, and for the better!” —Wendy Bruneau, High Mowing School in Wilton, New Hampshire

For more information, contact Jennie Jadow, Education Programs Manager, at jenniejadow@shakespeare.org or call 413-637-1199 ext. 108.