Located in the San Francisco East Bay Area, Golestan Education is an independent international school with a Persian Language Immersion Preschool and a Multilingual International Elementary School (K-5). Golestan is an IB candidate school and serves a total of over 100 students in its morning and afternoon programs. Class sizes range from 10-12 (preschool) to 16 (elementary and after school programming) with a minimum of two teachers per class.
Golestan supports the development of kind, innovative, and courageous children through experiential and constructivist learning, with a focus on risk-taking, environmental stewardship, and a deep understanding of other cultures and languages.
The school’s teaching methodology is influenced by Emergent, Montessori, and Waldorf philosophies, while grounding children in nature and calming indoor/outdoor learning spaces. There is an emphasis on creating and maintaining a multisensory nurturing environment - a place where children feel respected, safe, and loved .
Children at Golestan develop a profound understanding of the world around them with a deep appreciation and responsibility for our planet and its inhabitants. The content does an especially good job of conveying the interconnectedness of the world and of their place in it, with the express purpose of having young children understand themselves as just one small piece of a much larger whole. As an IB candidate school, Golestan integrates the IB learner profile into its curriculum to support the development of learners who are inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced, and reflective. They work to nourish well-rounded ‘whole’ and inspiring human beings in a warm, encouraging environment that treats the students with the same respect as an adult.
Golestan Education carries out its mission through Golestan School and the Golestan Collaborative (The Colab). The Colab was developed with the express purpose of sharing best practices both on immersion language schools and on curriculum that fosters creative, altruistic children, with an emphasis on environmental stewardship. The Colab is not just a static website or dropbox of curriculum materials – half of the operation of the school is dedicated to the Colab and to providing pro-bono support to other educators worldwide. The Colab has consulted with hundreds of communities across the U.S. and internationally, including Nepal, India, Iran, Iraq, and Kenya.
