“I am passionate about setting students up for success in the future. I believe that for better or worse, educators make decisions every day and every year that will change students’ lives. I teach students and educators to teach like it matters because it does. I believe in pouring into students and helping them to tap uncover and develop gifts and skills that no one can take away from them so that they can grow up and truly change the world.” – Naomi O’Brien
Naomi O’Brien is an educator, content creator, and author with over 10 years of experience in the classroom. She has taught PreK-5 in a variety of roles, but most of her time was spent in the K-2 grade levels. She has Early Elementary, ESOL, and Gifted and Talented endorsements. Naomi prides herself on building cultural connections with her students and their families and using research-based practices to provide quality education to students.
Naomi has presented and shared her practices with teachers across the country and world through education conferences, her book, Unpack Your Impact, her self-created educational resources, and through her social media platform as Read Like a Rock Star.
Naomi’s passion for culturally responsive teaching, accurate primary social studies lessons, rigorous reading instruction, and social justice-oriented education has been a driving force behind the message she hopes to instill in other educators and children.
PD Type: Keynote
Designed Length: 75 minutes
Platform: Virtual or In-Person
Target Audience: Teachers, Administrators (school and district level), Staff
“Do the best you can until you know better…” -Dr. Maya Angelou
We have 180 days with our students a year.
Struggling readers don’t need more time — they need the right kind of instruction. In this hands-on, high-impact PD, we’ll dive into the most effective, research-backed ways to rescue readers from guesswork and frustration. You’ll learn how to identify exactly what’s holding students back and how to intervene with strategies that actually work. We’ll explore the science of reading in action with routines, tools, and activities you can use right away to build decoding skills, boost confidence, and accelerate growth.
Whether your students are behind in phonics, fluency, or phonological awareness, this session will equip you to help them make up ground — and keep growing all year long. Walk away with resources, routines, and renewed confidence that you can catch your students up.
PD Type: Keynote or Workshop
Designed Length: 75 minutes
Platform: Virtual or In-Person
Target Audience: K-2 Teachers, Staff
Getting young writers to express their thoughts clearly and revise their work can feel like an uphill battle—especially for our language learners. In this practical, strategy-packed PD session, we’ll break down how to teach K–2 students to move from oral language to written expression using clear scaffolds and the full writing process.
You’ll learn how to:
Support students in planning their writing through visuals, oral rehearsal, and sentence stems
Teach sentence building with intention, structure, and purpose
Guide students from single sentences to strong, organized paragraphs
Make editing and revising meaningful (and age-appropriate!)
Use writing routines that support language development and academic vocabulary growth
Walk away with sample mini-lessons, graphic organizers, and tools you can use to help every student—especially English language learners—grow into a confident, capable writer.
PD Type: Enrichment
Designed Length: 30-45 minutes
Platform: Virtual or In-Person
Target Audience: Students
Book Naomi for a virtual or in person author visit to share her journey of becoming an author with your students. Her visits generally include:
• Three 30-45 minute presentations about learning how to read, using your voice, and becoming an author.
Q&A to follow.
• A read-aloud of her picture book(s). (You’ll Never Guess What I’m Thinking About, You’ll Never Guess What I’m Saying, Micah’s BIG Question)
• Optional book signing time with students and staff.
We would love to help you plan a visit that your students will enjoy and be inspired by!
Please fill out the form below to get information on dates and booking rates.
PD Type: Workshop
Designed Length: 60-120 minutes
Platform: Virtual Only
Target Audience: Teachers, Administrators (school and district level), Staff
By laying out their revolutionary approach to teaching social studies, O’Brien and Tabb explain how to provide students with a deep but achievable understanding of global social systems as they’re transformed by history, sociology, economics, geography, and civics. And, because the Unpack Your Impact curriculum can be folded into existing lessons for almost any topic, students garner an inclusive and interdisciplinary appreciation for how all learning shapes, and is shaped by, a diverse array of human cultures. Inspiring, optimistic, and empowering, Unpack Your Impact shows that primary teachers can make a positive impact—individually and globally..
PD Type: Workshop
Designed Length: 75 minutes
Platform: Virtual or In-Person
Target Audience: Teachers
There are about 3.3 million gifted children in the United States…and those are just the ones we know about! Roughly 3.6 million students fly under the radar and go undetected in our classrooms. Whether students have the label or not, they are still gifted learners. Even when students are fortunate enough to have gifted pull-out once a week, they are still gifted when they return to their gen. Ed. classrooms. Join Naomi as she helps you discover how to discover the gifted teacher in you! We can all be gifted teachers to be the most effective we can be for our gifted students! Naomi will show you some shifts you can make in your classroom to meet your gifted students’ needs without feeling like you’re doing double the work!
PD Type: Training
Designed Length: 60-90 minutes
Platform: In-Person or Virtual
Target Audience: Teachers (school and district level), Staff
Let’s Create the Perfect PD for Your School or District
Looking for professional development that actually speaks to your teachers’ real challenges? Let’s build it together.
Schedule a free discovery call, and we’ll pinpoint your school or district’s biggest pain points in K–5 instruction—whether it’s foundational reading skills, writing instruction, student engagement, or something in between.
From there, I’ll design a custom, research-backed PD session (or series!) that gives your educators the hands-on strategies, routines, and tools they need to make an impact right away.
Let’s make sure your next PD day is the one that makes a difference.
Thank you for your interest in booking a private professional development experience! Please fill out our Booking Inquiry form and a member of our team will contact you soon.
Thank you for your interest in booking a private professional development experience! Please fill out our Booking Inquiry form and a member of our team will contact you soon.
