Marcia L. Tate

Dr. Marcia L. Tate is the kind of presenter who makes you forget you're in professional development. Her workshops have been described as "light-hearted and life-changing," and the two things aren't in tension — that's just Marcia. She brings an infectious energy to every room she enters, a contagious love of teaching and learning that her audiences feel immediately and talk about long after she's left. It makes sense when you know where she came from: thirty years inside the DeKalb County School System in Georgia, working as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, language arts coordinator, and ultimately Executive Director of Professional Development. She didn't build her approach to brain-based teaching in a research silo. She built it in the trenches.

Marcia's academic roots run deep in Georgia. She earned her bachelor's degree in psychology and elementary education from Spelman College — which later honored her with the Apple Award for excellence in education — before going on to earn a master's in remedial reading from the University of Michigan, a specialist degree in educational leadership from Georgia State University, and her doctorate in educational leadership from Clark Atlanta University. That combination of a strong liberal arts foundation, deep literacy expertise, and progressive leadership training shows up directly in how she thinks about teaching: not as a set of techniques, but as a practice rooted in how human beings actually learn.

She is best known for the Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites series, a suite of bestselling books that give teachers 20 research-based strategies for aligning instruction with how the brain works best — movement, music, graphic organizers, storytelling, cooperative learning, and more. The series has reached hundreds of thousands of educators, administrators, parents, and community leaders worldwide, and its staying power comes down to a simple fact: the strategies work, and Marcia makes them feel achievable. Her workshops are practical, joyful, and immediately applicable, which is exactly what teachers need.

Away from the stage, Marcia is centered by family. She and her husband Tyrone live in the Atlanta area and are the proud parents of Jennifer, Jessica, and Christopher — and the even prouder grandparents of eight: Aaron, Aidan, Christian, Maxwell, Roman, Shiloh, Aya, and Noah. If you've ever seen Marcia talk about her grandchildren, you know that the same warmth and enthusiasm she brings to a room full of educators is the very same thing that fills her home.