This study examines formative evaluation recommendations that the authors made to four different professional development (PD) projects over three years. The results of this study show that formative feedback can impact PD design and implementation. The results of this study suggest that evaluation efforts can take on a new purpose – the PD of professional developers. The authors argue that as evaluators, they interpreted what they know about PD from the research and acted as conduits of empirical findings to the PD project teams. Hence, their recommendations reflected their own knowledge and beliefs about PD, which, as active teacher education researchers, were well rooted in the PD research literature.