Academics
Beyond Expectations: Insight Through Experience
A San Francisco Waldorf School education inspires, challenges, and awakens students to the world around them as they discover and develop the self within. At every age and grade level, we emphasize hands-on experiences and creative thinking, integrating the arts across the curriculum and encouraging students to ask deep questions of themselves and others.
Engagement, camaraderie, and a social mission are pillars across our school community, from Preschool to Twelfth Grade. These values are modeled by our extraordinary team of teachers and administrators, who are dedicated to promoting an environment where every student is seen and celebrated. As educators, we strive to help students reach their fullest potential and find their place in the world, with a sense of purpose and agency.
"My desire to be the best human being I can be, to live harmoniously within myself and the world around me and to help foster similar impulses for loving growth in others, led me to Waldorf education."
- Connor Williams, Grades School Class Teacher
Schedule a campus visit or click on the links below to learn more about our programs.
Grades 9-12
Know Yourself, Know the World
Grades 6-8
Experience the World
Kindergarten-5th Grade
Explore the World
Parent-Child, Preschool, and Transitional Kindergarten
We’re Here For You from the Start
The Waldorf Difference
Waldorf education is a constantly renewing, human-centered approach to learning. In more than 1,100 schools worldwide, Waldorf education prepares students for life by cultivating independence, self-knowledge, reverence for the world’s beauty, and creative, analytical, and critical faculties.
Inquiry-Based and Interdisciplinary
Our curriculum is rich in imagination, storytelling, and play in the early years, transitioning to an experiential and inquiry-based approach as students grow. Through observation, experimentation, hands-on activities, class discussion, and creative work, students are encouraged to engage deeply with each topic in the curriculum, often working across disciplines to support a holistic and practical understanding of what they’re learning.
At our school, just as in the real world, everything is connected. In Third Grade, students plant seeds and stir compost in the school’s teaching garden to understand how food is grown. They see how motors work in Physics class while studying the wide-ranging historical effects of the Industrial Revolution in Eighth Grade. During an overnight trip to Salt Point State Park, Ninth Graders take a deeper look at the eras of geologic time while collecting rocks along the shore. The result of these experiences, and so many others throughout our innovative curriculum, is well-rounded and curious students who are confident engaging in diverse disciplines and life experiences.
Rigorous and Creative
Through dynamic, hands-on lessons, teachers at San Francisco Waldorf School inspire and challenge their students to learn by doing. Our students discover science through lived phenomena, explore mathematics through the search for elegant solutions, and encounter the great ideas of humankind through biography. Artistic activity, creative thinking, and development of imagination are integral to learning at SFWS, and visual art, music, drama, poetry, and creative writing are incorporated across disciplines, supporting retention of, and a meaningful connection to, academic material.
Built on Relationships
Our students stand out. They are quick to lend a hand to a classmate, confident when speaking to adults, ready to ask thoughtful questions in class, and happy in each other’s company. Through small class sizes and multi-year teacher-student relationships, we ensure that every student at San Francisco Waldorf School is seen and valued. Here, students feel a sense of belonging within our welcoming school community, which helps them develop courage, agency, emotional depth, empathy, and ethical reasoning as they grow into young adults.
Aligned with Human Development
At SFWS, teachers are deeply invested in their students and trained to consider students' intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual growth. From the wonder of childhood through the dynamic intellect that emerges in adolescence, our curriculum is carefully designed to meet students' capacities and interests at each age and stage of development, which leads to increased engagement and confidence in the classroom.