Professional Development

Folger Education offers in-person and virtual options for professional development. We have a range of options to fit your schedule, whether you’re teaching in the Washington, DC, area or elsewhere in the United States.

By participating in our professional development trainings, you’ll learn the best ways to use the Folger Method in your classroom. The Folger Method is a way of teaching complex texts that enables all students to own—and enjoy—the process of reading closely, interrogating texts, discovering language with peers, and contributing to the ongoing human conversation about words and ideas.

Summer Professional Development

For more than four decades, the Folger has hosted National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Teaching Shakespeare Institutes every other summer that combine the best of scholarship, performance, and classroom pedagogy. The 2026 summer program continued this tradition, bringing participants into conversation with leading scholars, mentor teachers, and Folger staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library from June 28 – July 17, 2026. Participants engage with the Folger’s unparalleled collection, attend seminars and workshops, and develop their own classroom-ready materials rooted in the Folger Method. Teachers conduct individual research projects during the Institute, working directly with rare books and primary sources in the Folger collection. The daily life of the participant is discovery-filled and rigorous as well as joyful and energizing.

Summer Academies are one-week versions of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, offered in the summers when TSI is not in session. Our 2025 Summer Academy, The Magic of Macbeth, focused on resources and skills for teaching Shakespeare’s Macbeth.