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!).
Now, I haven’t attended NAGC’s annual event since 2018. Perhaps 2026‘s conference will be dramatically better. So take all of this with a grain of salt. Ask around. See what people’s actual experiences have been like.
How Much Does NAGC 2026 Cost?
Unless you’re a student, the event costs between $549 to $819 for one person! And in order to get that cheaper “member” price, you have to… pay to become an NAGC member – wiping out much of the discount.
Here was 2025’s pricing:
Add the pre-conference, flights, and hotel and it will cost you well over $1000 to attend NAGC’s annual conference.
But Is It Worth Attending?
In my opinion? No.
NAGC’s conference has the same problems as most education conferences (and I’ve been to quite a few.)
- No one checks if presenters have actually done the things they’re talking about. So you get people on stage talking about stuff they’ve never even tried. This is so common that I wrote a whole post about it.
- No one helps the presenters prepare. This leads to nervous speakers who have never ever practiced their talk out loud before.
- No one in charge has seen the talks beforehand. Presentations were judged by a written submission sent in months before the actual event. In most cases, the organizers are watching the speakers for the first time along with you.
This is true of most education conferences: there’s little quality control in terms of who’s on stage.
NAGC Is an Organization for Academics
NAGC has the additional problem of being run by university people. You can see this by scrolling their leadership page. (It is not a good sign that they need a “School/District Representative” on their board!)
The NAGC membership benefits also show the academic nature of this organization. It’s all journals and “quarterly magazines.” 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.)
It’s Planned By Academics, But The Attendees Are Teachers
So the conference naturally skews towards academia – even though most attendees work for a public school district.
And it’s perfectly fine to have an academic conference! But I wish they did a better job of communicating that this isn’t so much a “teacher event” as a “university professor event”.
So, if you’re into academia, NAGC might be worth it. I’m sure it’s a great networking, resume-building event for university people.
But this event is not catered to teachers who are in the trenches, working with actual students.
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.
But, if you really want to go to a conference, look for smaller, local events that are run by folks who deal with the same problems you deal with. My favorite education event has always been the local conference that I went to as a teacher. It’s highly connected to the local community, only takes up a morning, includes lunch in the price (yes!), and is entirely run by people who work at nearby school districts. This kind of event meets the needs of its attendees.