Best Professional Development for Teachers: 7 People Who Shaped Mine
The best professional development for teachers isn't a single class: it's finding the specific speakers and authors whose ideas still hold up in your own classroom years later. This veteran teacher's list of seven career-changing PD sources includes Todd Whitaker, the Kagans, Rick Wormeli, and Carol Ann Tomlinson, chosen for ideas he still uses today.
It's funny that in the business world, when you steal another company's ideas, you may end up in a lawsuit. In education, we encourage each other to beg, borrow, and steal successful ideas so we can put them to work in our own schools. Since I started in education back in the late '90s, I've never been able to take someone else's approach and run it exactly as they did. I always put my own twist on it, whether I'm adapting to the students in my classroom, the colleagues I teach with, or the latest research. This started a professional development earthquake in my career, and I became a "PD Junkie." Are you a PD Junkie?
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The following seven people changed my educational path, and several of them changed it more than once. For that reason, these are the people who make my list. Todd Whitaker made me think about What Great Teachers Do Differently back in 2003. He gave me 14 ideas every great teacher should put into practice, and the latest edition adds three more. Ten years later, Dr. Whitaker supported me as a principal with The 10 Minute In-Service (2013). Meeting and listening to Steven Layne has been just as formative. He spoke at my elementary school in 2004 and helped me put Igniting a Passion for Reading into practice. Most recently, Dr. Layne was in Montana at our Elementary and Middle School Principals' Conference, where he discussed his book, In Defense of Read-Aloud. His message is powerful, and what I've gained from it shows up in my school every day.
Ask me what the best professional development for teachers actually looks like, and this list is my honest answer: not a single workshop, but a handful of people whose ideas held up over years of returning to them. These seven people are the foundation of what I believe about teaching. I'd recommend building your own list. Who makes your top seven? Why do they make it? If I'd made this list five years ago, would it look the same? Would it look the same five years from now? These seven people would likely be on both versions of my list a decade apart, which is exactly why making the list is worth doing. Each one represents something you carry into your teaching, since we're all built from the pieces of what we read and take in.
1. Todd Whitaker: Professor Emeritus, Indiana State University
When Todd Whitaker is on the docket at a national conference, I'm there. He draws a huge crowd, and it's often standing room only. If you work in education and haven't heard of him, he's worth seeking out. His books are excellent, but seeing him in person is even more useful. This past summer in Washington, D.C., he presented alongside his daughter. Dr. Whitaker, now professor emeritus at Indiana State and a professor of educational leadership at the University of Missouri, changed how I approach the job. His 2003 book, What Great Teachers Do Differently, gave me 14 concrete qualities to set as personal goals. Later, as a principal, his book The 10 Minute In-Service changed how I ran staff meetings and professional learning community time. If you can't catch Dr. Whitaker in person, start with these:
- The 10 Minute In-Service
- What Great Teachers Do Differently
- What Great Principals Do Differently
- Shifting the Monkey
2. Denny McLoughlin: Creator of Trust Psychology and High Trust Thinking
Denny is the single most influential professional development provider I've worked with. I've taken his workshops eight times so far, with a ninth planned. Mr. McLoughlin has changed the way we talk to students, parents, and each other at my school. His work may be a paradigm shift for you, too, but the philosophy is designed to help you teach with more intention: it raises your awareness of a student's cognitive and emotional state and shows you how to develop students into independent, solution-based thinkers. That philosophy helps me create a school where students feel a real need to achieve and, in the philosophy's own terms, develop a moral commitment and the energy for a new approach to thinking, responsibility, and community. Everything I do gets run through that "High Trust" lens. Denny has described his approach as building on Dr. William Glasser's research and further developing it with strategies that hold up in real classrooms. He doesn't publish his work in book form, saying that writing it down invites misinterpretation. Here's how to connect with him instead:
- High Trust Thinking
- Call: 805-452-2303
- Email: [email protected]
- Attend a workshop (see the website above, or call)
3. Rick Wormeli: Writer and Teacher/Principal Trainer
Engagement and a real love of learning are what I remember most about Rick Wormeli. When I first started teaching middle school, his book Meet Me in the Middle had just come out, and my school district later brought him to Montana. I put his ideas to work almost as fast as I read them. Seeing him present in person was even more useful than the book. He's one of the most engaging speakers I've watched, and I became something of a Rick Wormeli junkie, reading everything he'd written and applying it. If you can't see Mr. Wormeli in person, these are the books that changed my path:
- Meet Me in the Middle: Becoming an Accomplished Middle Level Teacher
- Day One and Beyond: Practical Matters for New Middle-Level Teachers
- Fair Isn't Always Equal: Assessing and Grading in the Differentiated Classroom
- Summarization: 50 Techniques to Improve Student Learning
- Differentiation: From Planning to Practice
4. The 2 Sisters: Creators of Daily 5 and Math Daily 3
These two have reshaped how ELA and math get taught with a learning structure built around student choice. The Daily 5 isn't a curriculum: it's a structure for using real books to teach reading. The sisters also created a companion framework, CAFE (Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding Vocabulary), which many teachers use alongside it to talk about reading strategies with students. The whole philosophy runs against the textbook and toward student independence, built on the idea that no single textbook can cover every standard a classroom needs. That reset how I think about teaching reading and how much responsibility I hand my students for their own learning. The books and videos are useful, but watching these two in action is even more useful. In my experience, their sessions have consistently sold out, and they run only a handful of large venues each year, but they're worth the ticket. I've seen them four times over the past six years and plan to keep going, since they add new material regularly, especially around current brain research. If you can't catch them live, start here:
- The Daily 5: Fostering Literacy Independence in the Elementary Grades
- The CAFE Book: Engaging All Students in Daily Literacy Assessment and Instruction
- Who's Doing the Work? How to Say Less So Readers Can Do More by Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris
5. Steven Layne: Then a Professor at Judson University
Steven Layne, a professor at Judson University when I first encountered his work, was the first person to really ignite my interest in teaching reading. His approach works for new and veteran teachers alike, because it's aimed squarely at the apathy so many students bring to reading. The strategies in his books set him apart from most other literacy authors I've read. I've been lucky enough to see Dr. Layne speak five times over the years, and I've made the trip to his reading conference, Literacy in Motion at Judson University, more than once. In my experience, it consistently draws a full room and brings in strong literacy speakers, along with the authors themselves. If you can't catch Dr. Layne in person, start with these:
- Igniting a Passion for Reading: Successful Strategies for Building Lifetime Readers
- In Defense of Read-Aloud: Sustaining Best Practice
- Life's Literacy Lessons: Stories and Poems for Teachers
6. Spencer and Laurie Kagan: Creators of Kagan Publishing and Professional Development
This is the PD that changed how I engage students day-to-day. The Kagans have taken cooperative learning further than almost anyone else, with hundreds of cooperative-learning structures you can bring straight into a classroom. Spencer Kagan calls the goal "PIES": positive interdependence, individual accountability, equal participation, and simultaneous interaction. I've attended three different Kagan trainings over my career and walked away with something new each time. Building a classroom where students like each other, and collaborate around content because of it, is one of the most useful tools I've found. If you can't get to a Kagan workshop, these are worth a look:
- Kagan Publishing & Professional Development
- Kagan Cooperative Learning by Dr. Spencer Kagan and Miguel Kagan
- Smart Cards: kaganonline.com Smart Cards
7. Carol Ann Tomlinson: Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia
Carol Ann Tomlinson was the first person to give me, in effect, permission to change my curriculum to actually fit my students. I took that idea and ran with it. I knew I couldn't hand every student in my fifth-grade classroom the same work: some were two to three grade levels behind in reading, and others scored in the high school range on the Burns and Roe Inventory Assessment. Differentiating the product, the instruction, or the assessment became the way I met students where they were. I've only seen Dr. Tomlinson speak once, at an ASCD conference years ago, but her research and strategies have stayed with me my whole career. She's published widely, often in collaboration with other researchers. If you can't see Dr. Tomlinson in person, these are the books worth starting with:
- The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners
- How to Differentiate Instruction in Academically Diverse Classrooms
- Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom
- Integrating Differentiated Instruction & Understanding by Design: Connecting Content and Kids by Carol Ann Tomlinson and Jay McTighe
More professional development reading:
- 5 Trends in Professional Development We Must Think About
- Professional Development: How Sweet It Is
- Demonstrating Knowledge of Resources
- Popping the New School Year Bubble
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes professional development actually change how you teach, instead of just checking a box?
Repetition and follow-through. Every person on this list was worth revisiting more than once: Denny McLoughlin's workshops eight times, Steven Layne's talks five times, Kagan trainings three times. In my own experience, a single one-off session rarely changed my practice on its own. What stuck was coming back to the same framework as my classroom and my students changed, and building it into how I already taught rather than treating it as a separate task.
How do I find PD that isn't just a required credit hour?
Start with an author or speaker whose ideas you can point to something concrete, like a specific book, a named framework, or a strategy you can name and use tomorrow. Cooperative learning structures from Kagan, the Daily 5 reading framework, or Todd Whitaker's specific teacher qualities are all things you can test in your own room, not just listen to and forget.
Do I need to attend these in person to get value from them?
Mostly, but not entirely. Most of the educators on this list have books or other published resources that carry most of the same ideas. Denny McLoughlin is the exception: workshops and his website are the primary resources listed here, since he doesn't publish his approach in book form. In-person workshops offer real-time practice and Q&A, which is why repeat attendance matters so much for a source like his, but the published resources are where most teachers should start, as with everyone else on this list.
Is professional learning community (PLC) work a substitute for this kind of PD?
They serve different purposes. A PLC is where your own school works out how to apply an idea with your specific students and colleagues. The speakers and authors on this list are the sources of the idea in the first place. The strongest schools use both: bring in a framework like Kagan's or the Daily 5, then use PLC time to adapt it to your building.
How many PD sources should a teacher realistically be following?
Fewer than you'd think, in this teacher's experience. This list took a full career to build, roughly one deeply influential source every few years, not a new framework every semester. His take: picking one or two ideas and implementing them well beats sampling a dozen without following through on any.
- Repeat exposure is what made PD stick for this teacher. Every source on this list was revisited multiple times over a career, not attended once and shelved.
- Look for a named framework, not a general topic. Kagan's hundreds of cooperative-learning structures and the Daily 5's reading framework are concrete enough to test in your own classroom right away.
- Published resources are a useful starting point. Books and other materials can get you most of the way there, while workshops add practice, discussion, and Q&A. McLoughlin's work is the exception, available mainly through his workshops and website.
- A strong PD list builds slowly. This one took decades to assemble, which is closer to the realistic pace than trying a new program every semester.
Building a PD reading list like this one takes years, but choosing a degree program doesn't have to. The sponsored programs listed on this page cover coursework in classroom management, literacy instruction, and differentiated teaching- the same territory the speakers above built their careers on- with formats that fit around a full teaching schedule.
As a 5th grade teacher, in 2010 Jon won the Presidential Award for Elementary Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). As a principal, his school won the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award. In 2018, he won the National Distinguished Principal Award (NDP). In 2019 he won the National No Kid Hungry Breakfast Hero Award.
Jon is the author of three guides published on teacher.org: An Educator's Guide to Combat Bullying & Bully Prevention; Teacher Evaluation: A Transition Guide to Exemplary Performance; and You are the Wild Card: Infusing Fun Back into Curriculum. He has authored a children's picture book that was released January 2019 titled Benjamin’s Visit to Principal Reads Office…again! (available at www.archwaypublishing.com)
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