Is NAGC’s Annual Conference Worth The Cost?
If you’re a teacher working with gifted students, you might wonder…
Is NAGC’s annual conference worth the cost?
(And I’m talking about the National Association for Gifted Children, not any of the other NAGCs!).
I wrote this in 2018, after my last NAGC conference. NAGC may have changed since then. So take all of this with a grain of salt. Ask around. See what people’s recent experiences have been like.
But Is It Worth Attending?
In my opinion? No.
The NAGC conferences I attended had the same problems I saw at most education conferences (and I’ve been to quite a few.)
- A written proposal couldn’t tell me whether a presenter had actually used the ideas with students. So I sometimes watched people talk about things they had never tried. This became so common that I wrote a whole post about it.
- Some presenters seemed nervous and unprepared. It felt as if they had never practiced the talk out loud.
- Sessions were chosen from proposals sent in months before the event. NAGC now uses expert reviewers and a published scoring guide, but a proposal still isn’t the finished talk.
That doesn’t mean every talk is bad. It means the quality can vary a lot.
NAGC Still Leans Academic
NAGC’s current board includes professors and leaders from university centers. It also includes a middle-school gifted teacher, a school/district representative, and leaders from association and nonprofit organizations. So it isn’t accurate to say the group is simply run by university people.
But the academic influence is still easy to see. The $129 Premier membership includes access to three academic journals, along with two practical magazines, an online community, networks, webinars, voting, and discounts.
I joined for one year. None of it was useful for me as a teacher.
A personal anecdote which illustrates this problem. One year, NAGC declined all of my session proposals. I still attended. In one session, a university professor gave everyone a tour of Byrdseed.com.
Yes, MY OWN WEBSITE 😝 I wasn’t allowed to speak at NAGC. But an academic got to take the stage and speak for me – about my own work. When I asked NAGC leadership how this happened, they couldn’t really explain it. If you write a better paragraph in January, you get to speak in November. And guess who is better at writing: academics or classroom teachers?
(Now, I was friends with that professor. It wasn’t her fault. She was embarrassed when she saw me in the crowd. We laughed about it afterwards. But come on.)
The Program Still Leaned Academic
NAGC says the majority of its attendees work as classroom teachers, specialists, and district coordinators. It says the conference is designed for both specialists and general educators.
Good. That’s exactly who the event should serve.
But at the conferences I attended through 2018, the program still leaned toward academic work. Too many sessions felt built for researchers and university people rather than teachers who needed something useful for Monday morning.
Perhaps that has changed. Ask teachers who attended recently before you spend the money.
Just Get Into Classrooms Instead
And, honestly, I think the best way to get better at teaching is to skip the conferences and just watch great teachers at work. This is a big reason why I stopped speaking at events altogether. Listening to conference talks is just not an effective way to become a better teacher.