Professional Development for Teachers

We offer two seminar formats: seminars that last three hours and provide three Continuing Professional Development Units (CPDUs) and seminars that run for six hours (including a one-hour lunch break) and provide five CPDUs.

The Newberry is an accredited Professional Development provider for Illinois State Board of Education. To receive CPDU credits, participants must attend the seminar in its entirety and provide their Illinois Education Identification Number (IEIN).

Three-hour seminars cost a flat rate of $200 per seat. For administrators and school districts that are purchasing six or more seats, the rate is $170 per seat.

Five-hour seminars cost $270 per seat. This rate is reduced to $240 per seat when purchasing six or more seats.

We offer several professional development opportunities throughout the school year. More information about our 2025-26 offerings will be available soon.

CPScholars seminars run from 9:30am to 3:30pm (including a one-hour lunch break). We provide five Continuing Professional Development Units (CPDUs) for each seminar.

The Newberry is an accredited Professional Development provider for Illinois State Board of Education. To receive CPDU credits, participants must attend the seminar in its entirety and provide their Illinois Education Identification Number (IEIN).

All Chicago Public School teachers and administrators in the CPS system qualify for this free program. Attendees will also receive a $200 stipend for participating in a seminar at the Newberry. 

CPS educators may also qualify for an additional sub coverage stipend to offset their home district's substitute expenses. Participants will go through their school clerk to secure these funds. 

We offer several professional development opportunities throughout the school year. More information about our 2025-26 offerings will be available soon.

Dr. Rebecca Fall (University of Illinois Chicago)

This hands-on seminar offers an introduction to “bibliography”—the study of books as objects—focusing primarily on texts created between 1500 and 1700, when print technology was emerging as a viable industry and mass media was just starting to become possible. Participants will examine rare textual objects held by the Newberry and learn how they were made, used, sold, and shared. We will also consider how practicing book history translates to teaching media literacy today, and brainstorm how digital media formats express meaning beyond content.

Dr. Rebecca Fall (Ph.D. in English, Northwestern) is Graduate Academic Advisor for Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago. From 2019-2023, she served as Program Manager for the Newberry's Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, where she co-curated Seeing Race Before Race, a public exhibition and programming series exploring the roots of race-making from 1100 to 1800. Her scholarly work has appeared in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 and Shakespeare Studies, as well as in collections from Palgrave, Edinburgh UP, and Arden, and her doctoral dissertation was awarded the J. Leeds Barroll Prize by the Shakespeare Association of America. Her audience engagement work with The Public Theater and Chicago Shakespeare Theater has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Public Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Past Newberry Teacher Seminars: Close Reading the Sonnet from Renaissance England to 21st-Century America; Seeing Race Before Race; How to Imagine the Roots of Race in the Premodern Past; and Food and Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England.

Dr. Eric Selinger (DePaul University)

“If it ain’t a pleasure,” William Carlos Williams famously declares, “it ain’t a poem.” To be a good reader of poetry, then, is to read poems for pleasure—but how do we know where to look for the radically different pleasures that different sorts of poems can provide? How can we usefully describe and categorize those pleasures, building a vocabulary of delight, and how can reading poems for pleasure support or counterpoint the enduring curricular tasks of teaching close reading and the basics of literary history? Whether it focuses on a particular poem or poems, examples of a form or genre, or the work of a single poet, this seminar will introduce teachers to an accessible toolkit of terms and approaches that they and their students can use to make the chosen texts more enjoyable and interesting: a set of questions and reading habits that they can deploy to bring a poem to life as a character study, as a verbal contraption, and as part of a cultural conversation. Bringing thirty years of experience to the table, including five NEH summer seminars on poetry pedagogy, Professor Selinger will be happy to lead seminars similar to those he has done in the past at the Newberry, or to design a seminar around texts and topics that you currently teach, or have been itching (or even afraid) to try.

Dr. Eric Selinger is Professor of English at DePaul University. His research and teaching interests focus on issues of love, desire, literary pleasure, poetry, and popular genre fiction. Selected authored and co-edited publications include What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell, 1998), Jewish American Poetry (UPNE/Brandeis, 2000), Romance Fiction and American Culture (Ashgate, 2016), and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (Routledge, 2021).

Past Newberry Teacher Seminars: The Wasteland at 100: Seeing it Freshly, Making it Ours; Frost at Play; Characters, Contraptions, Conversations: Three Paths to the Pleasures of Poetry; and The Morning (After) in America: A Post-Election Poetry Seminar.

Nora Epstein, Kara Johnson, and Lisa Schoblasky (Newberry Library)

Incorporating primary sources into the classroom can be an exhilarating way for students to engage with history and make powerful connections to their lives. However, primary sources present challenges for both students and teachers. This workshop will guide instructors through finding, contextualizing, and questioning historical documents and designing lessons that empower students to think critically about the archival record. We will explore how to interrogate these documents as historical witnesses, discovering their internal motivations and implicit biases. Through close analysis of rare books, ephemera, and archival records, we will examine whose stories are found in history and, importantly, who is excluded. Over one day, we will strengthen skills such as artifactual literacy and object-based teaching while introducing resources for enriching your curriculum with voices from the past and acknowledging archival silences.

Dr. Nora Epstein is the Newberry's Instruction and Outreach Librarian and a Postdoctoral Fellow with Yale's Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She received her PhD in History from the University of St. Andrews in 2021. She also holds a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois and a Master of Bibliography from the University of St. Andrews. She is passionate about introducing primary source research and artifactual literacy through hands-on workshops.

Dr. Kara Johnson is Director of Teacher Programs at the Newberry. She earned a PhD in English at Northwestern University and also has extensive experience working at several educational nonprofit institutions in the Chicago area, including Open Books and the Odyssey Project. While at the Newberry, she has developed several large-scale partnership programs with Chicago Public Schools, including with the CPS K-12 Social Science department.

Lisa Schoblasky is the Director of Reader Services at the Newberry Library and is committed to finding new and exciting ways to connect the public with primary source materials. She has worked at the Newberry for over 20 years as the Reference Librarian, General Collections Services Librarian, Special Collections Services Librarian, and Instruction & Outreach Librarian. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English with an Emphasis on Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Master of Library and Information Sciences from Dominican University.

Dr. Andrew Trees (Roosevelt University)

Alexander Hamilton famously called the Supreme Court “the least dangerous branch,” but the Court has now come to play a dominant role in the American political system. We will explore how this transformation has occurred beginning with how the founders originally talked about the Court at the Constitutional Convention to the key moments in the expansion of the Court’s power from the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into state law to the increasing politicization of the appointment process to the growing disregard of precedent. Finally, we will consider some recent decisions that reveal the ever-expanding nature of the Supreme Court’s power and reach.

Dr. Andrew Trees is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University. He has published several books, including The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (Princeton University Press) and The Forgotten Revolution: How a coward, a Quaker, a con man, and a traitor saved the American Revolution (University of South Carolina Press, forthcoming). He has an M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in American history.

Past Newberry Teacher Seminars: The Supreme Court and the Problem of Interpretation; Will the Real Fourteenth Amendment Please Stand Up? The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action

Dr. Casey Caldwell (Carthage College)

Shakespeare's plays are amongst the greatest literature ever written in the English language and yet can also be challenging for younger and older readers, student and teacher, alike. This Shakespeare seminar will cover in-depth themes, historical context, and a variety of teaching methods tailored to the needs of your school and teachers.

Dr. Casey Caldwell is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Carthage College, where he teaches courses on early modern drama, ghost stories in literature and film, literature and citizenship, love and money, and more. His research focuses on how Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights addressed economic issues surrounding citizenship in early modern England. Professor Caldwell is also a seasoned thespian, having worked with many professional theaters and performance education programs in early modern theater, including Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London, the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia, Austin Shakespeare, Chicago Shakespeare, and the Shakespeare at Winedale program.

Past Newberry Teacher Seminars: Shakespeare's History Plays; Macbeth; Shakespeare’s First Folio; and Critical Perspectives and Historical Sources of King Lear

Stacey A. Gibson (Transform the Collective)

There are two remarkable and difficult realities about schools: 1) Almost every person has a direct and indirect experience of schools which makes attending schools one of the few shared common experiences among the entire breadth of the population; and 2) Schools are one of America's most visible intersections of age, money, race, religion, ability and more.

For those who work in schools, the changing landscape of society and learners presents deep challenges... and the potential for success. At Transform the Collective we curate customized facilitation around an array of school and workplace related issues, including professional wellness, group dynamics and processes, curricular design, policy implementation and more.

Stacey A. Gibson is an accomplished author, TED speaker, founder and principal consultant of Transform the Collective, LLC, a professional wellness consultancy and co-founder of Self-Care Laboratories, LLC, a quality-of-life consultancy. She is a group dynamics strategist, writer, and educator who trains teams on work related anxiety, burnout, weaponized silences, equity, professional wellness, and healthy group dynamics. Her writing about engaging complex truths appeared in English Journal, Rethinking Ethnic Studies, and Carnegie Hall's Afrofuturism Festival. Additionally, she has written professional development curriculum for two documentaries. Her not-guilty pleasures include sitting still, cooking delightful meals, riding her bike faster than she should (she wears a helmet!), and working on writing projects, especially the ones which most scare her.

Past Newberry Teacher Seminars: Sharp Eyes in the Middle of the Storm: Maintaining Professional Clarity & Wellness in Times of Crisis; and Beyond Burnout: Moral Injury & Teacher Wellness in Times of Societal Change.