Phillip Done
Phillip Done was born in San Jose, California, and grew up in Sunnyvale. Phil earned his Bachelors of Music and Masters in Education from San Jose State University. He has taught elementary school for twenty years, mostly in California public schools. Phil received the Schwab Foundation Distinguished Teacher Award and was nominated for the Disney Teacher of the Year Award.

When he is not teaching, Phil enjoys studying languages, going to garage sales, collecting old movie posters, and learning how to play the piano (He never practiced when he was a kid).

Recently, Phil returned from teaching elementary school at the American International School in Budapest. He currently lives in Mountain View, California. 32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching is his first book.

Sheila Eller
Sheila Eller has worked in a multitude of educational settings during her career. In addition to her current position as a principal in the Stillwater, Minnesota, School District, she also has served as a principal in other schools in Minnesota and Illinois, as a university professor, as a special education teacher, as a Title I math teacher, and as a self-contained classroom teacher in Grades 1-4. She is a member of the executive board of the Minnesota Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and has been a regional president of the Minnesota Association of Elementary School Principals. She has completed advanced coursework in educational administration and supervision at St. Cloud State University and holds a master's degree from Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and a bachelor's degree from Iowa State University.

Ms. Eller is a regular presenter at the ASCD national conventions, sharing her expertise on the topic of effective staff meetings and multiage instruction. While serving as a professor at National-Louis University in Evanston, Illinois, she worked on the development team for a classroom mathematics series that was adopted by several districts in the region. Her classroom and instructional techniques were featured in a video that was produced as a complement to this series. She works with educators to develop energized staff meetings, school improvement initiatives, multiage teaching strategies, employee supervision, and other teaching and learning content areas.

John Eller
John Eller, PhD, has had a variety of experiences working with adults during his years in education. He has worked with graduate students to develop professional learning communities; served as the executive director of the Minnesota Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development; worked as a principals' training center director; held a position as an assistant superintendent for curriculum, learning, and staff development; and held several principal positions in Iowa and Illinois. In addition to the work he does in training and supporting facilitators, he also works in the areas of dealing with difficult people; building professional learning communities; employee evaluation; conferencing skills; coaching skills; strategic planning strategies; school improvement planning and implementation; differentiated instruction; leadership for differentiation; employee recruitment, selection, and induction; supervisory skills; and effective teaching strategies.

Dr. Eller has authored books on substitute teaching, wrote The Training Video Series for the Professional School Bus Driver, contributes articles to the publication Superintendents Only, and assisted in the design of the e-learning communities used at the building level for staff development. He wrote Effective Group Facilitation in Education: How to Energize Meetings and Manage Difficult Groups, released by Corwin Press in 2004.

Given her interests in language and cultural diversity, she has worked extensively as an ethnographic researcher and collaborator in underrepresented communities. Among them are Latinos in the Southwest, Russian refugees, Hmongs in central California, Alaskan Natives in Alaska, and transnational populations in Mexico and Spain, where she has also lectured. Some of these communities appear in her earlier books: The Power of Community; Literacy for Empowerment; Protean Literacy; Crossing Cultural Borders, School and Society, and Involving Latino Families in the Schools. In Building Culturally Responsive Classrooms, she offers a composite of insights, instructions, and possibilities emerging from various research projects during the course of her academic career.

Margo Gottlieb
Margo Gottlieb is a specialist in the design of assessments for English language learners in preK-12 settings and evaluation of educational programs. Having started her career as an English as a Second language (ESL) and bilingual teacher, for the past two decades, Margo has consulted with and provided technical assistance to states, publishers, universities, and professional organizations. In 2004, Margo was Fulbright Scholar in Chile and an evaluator for a dual language school in Italy; in 2002, she was a teacher educator in Brazil. She has served on numerous U.S. task forces, committees, and expert panels in addition to presenting at over a hundred international and national conferences.

Presently, Margo is Director, Assessment and Evaluation, Illinois Resource Center, and Lead Developer for World-class Instructional Design and Assessment (WIDA), a consortium of 10 states. Active in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), she currently chairs the committee on revising the pre-K-12 ESL standards and has held numerous leadership positions.

Margo's degrees include a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis, Evaluation Research and Program Design, an M.A. in Applied Linguistics, and a B.A. in the Teaching of Spanish. She has published a host of assessment instruments, manuals, guidebooks, monographs, chapters, and articles. In addition, she is a contributing author to a comprehensive K-5 ESL program.

Thommie Piercy
Thommie Piercy's leadership and instructional experiences include earning her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Human Resource Development from the University of Maryland in 1997. As a principal and a teacher, she spent ten years teaching graduate courses to educators from states in the region. Dr. Piercy's research received the Reading Research Award from the State of Maryland International Reading Association. She was bestowed the Bailor Award for her Distinguished Career in Education from McDaniel College. As a teacher, she was selected one of five expert teachers by the Maryland State Department of Maryland. She was awarded the Hero's Award by CASA.

Piercy's previous publications include chapters in Habits of Mind (ASCD), Step-Up-to Excellence (Scarecrow Press), Critical Thinking and Reasoning (Hampton Press), a contribution to Reading Essentials (Heinemann), and articles in The Elementary School Journal and the Journal for MASCD. In the area of professional development, Dr. Piercy has presented at ASCD National Conferences, The International Reading Association Conference (IRA), and numerous state Principals' Academies, Assessment Consortiums, and Administrative and Supervisory groups.

Marcia Tate
Marcia L. Tate, EdD, is the former Executive Director of Professional Development for the DeKalb County School System, Decatur, Georgia. During her 30-year career with the district, she has been a classroom teacher, reading specialist, language arts coordinator, and staff development director. She received the 2001 Distinguished Staff Developer Award for the State of Georgia, and her department was chosen to receive the Exemplary Program Award for the state.

Marcia is currently an educational consultant and has taught over 125,000 administrators, teachers, parents, and business and community leaders throughout the world. She is a member of the Corwin Press Speaker's Bureau and the author of the following three bestsellers: Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites: 20 Instructional Strategies That Engage the Brain, "Sit and Get" Won't Grow Dendrites: 20 Professional Learning Strategies That Engage the Adult Brain, and Reading and Language Arts Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites: 20 Literacy Strategies That Engage the Brain. Participants in her workshops refer to them as "the best ones they have ever experienced" because Marcia uses the 20 strategies outlined in her books to actively engage her audiences.

Susan Udelhofen
Susan Udelhofen is a national staff development leader providing consulting services to school districts, education agencies, universities, and colleges. Her work concentrates primarily on issues and practices related to curriculum mapping, teacher mentoring, assessment, standards, and program evaluation.

Dr. Udelhofen earned a doctorate in curriculum and instruction and an M.S. in educational psychology, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her experience includes work at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction as a Goals 2000 consultant and gifted and talented consultant. She has taught courses in teacher mentoring, assessment, reading methods, children's literature, gifted and talented education, and also served as supervisor/instructor of preservice teachers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an experienced classroom teacher and holds current licensure. She is the author of Keys to Curriculum Mapping: Strategies and Tools to Make It Work (2005, Corwin Press) and coauthor of The Mentoring Year: A Step-by-Step Guide to Professional Development (2003, Corwin Press) and The Teacher Journal: Reflections About Teaching and Learning (self-published).