ER&D, the AFT's award-winning professional development program, is a hit with new and veteran teachers alike

By Mike Rose

Randy Keillor remembers the breaking point. It was several years back, the end of a marking period, and he and other teachers at his Minnesota high school in a suburb of St. Paul had been herded into the auditorium for what passed as professional development back then: a woman perched on the stage who spent the next 90 minutes playing the guitar and singing songs to the overworked educators.

“I don’t want to be cruel. She actually had a pretty good singing voice,” says Keillor, who sneaked to the back of the auditorium that afternoon to join other teachers who were grading papers on the sly, almost oblivious to the woman who was earning a $600 engagement fee strumming and singing to the crowd. “I just couldn’t see how this had anything to do with making me a better teacher.”

Today, Keillor is a national trainer for the AFT educational research and dissemination (ER&D) program and is spearheading an initiative through Education Minnesota, the union’s state affiliate, to bring the award-winning professional development program to even more educators. Keillor’s first brush with ER&D came in 2000, when he was buttonholed by his local into taking a weeklong regional ER&D training program. “Staff development always seemed like a time waster—stupid activities—and I told my wife ‘I don’t think it’s going to be that big a deal and should be home soon,’” he remembers of that ER&D training. “After the first night, I called her and said, ‘I think I’m going to be here all week.’”

More than a thousand miles away in Marion, Fla., kindergarten teacher Helene Hotaling was following the same script. Three years ago, her local asked her to join other teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards for a nine-day ER&D training session at Vero Beach. “I went there fully intending to go to the class for an hour or two and then maybe hang out at the beach,” she recalls. “I never made it down to the beach. I went to everything and spent every night doing the homework.”

Ultimately Hotaling became an ER&D trainer, and her enthusiasm for the program began to rub off on her husband, Gene, a teacher at Forest High School in the district, who had joined the union early in his career but let his membership lapse after the first year. Unlike so many professional development offerings, ER&D “was based on proven, effective research,” he said of the ER&D courses that he saw his wife working on. “It wasn’t ‘just a good idea’ and it wasn’t ‘just one teacher who had tried this and made it work.’

“It became obvious through the good work of the ER&D program that our teachers union was doing so much more than just talking about improving education and teaching as a profession, it was actually doing something about it—something tangible,” says Gene Hotaling, a former teacher of the year for the Marion school district, who would rejoin the union based on what he saw. The union was “helping in the trenches, not preaching from the pulpit. I began to see the union as the only organization making a real, hands-on change.”

Isolated incidents? Not if you ask Madonna Jackson-Williams and other local union leaders across central Florida. ER&D “has been really successful over the last four years and a wonderful opportunity to build membership,” says Jackson-Williams, president of the Escambia Education Association. “At our last training for new teachers, the local added 50 members, about half of the new group, and ER&D was the drawing card.”

And the appeal of ER&D extends far beyond rookies, Keillor stresses. Many seasoned classroom veterans have reconnected with their locals once they experience ER&D and the common ground it offers between unions and mid-career teachers seeking to strengthen the profession. In a state with a long union tradition like Minnesota, “getting people to sign membership cards isn’t tough; getting people actively involved in the union—that’s the fight,” explains Keillor, a negotiator for the St. Francis Federation of Teachers. “It definitely appeals to teachers who sometimes see the union as about nothing but salary and grievances.”

Case in point: Sharri Van Alstine, a 13-year veteran and a colleague of Keillor’s at St. Francis High School. Her union involvement was minimal for most of her career as a high school choir teacher. Then she began taking ER&D courses two years ago and was bowled over. “Everything was practical, research-based and things I could apply right to my classroom,” she remembers. “There were things that I walked out and used the next day.”

And the most positive aspect of ER&D, she stresses, is the opportunity it gives teachers to talk to colleagues about things that really benefit students. The experience was the main reason she would later agree to work on her local union’s salary compensation committee. “It’s my first year doing something with the union,” she says. “I got to meet and know a lot of the people, and I trust them. It was important to me that [union] leaders saw ER&D as a worthy endeavor.”

And there’s little doubt that the appeal of ER&D has grown in this era of federal mandates for “adequate yearly progress” by schools and “highly qualified” educators.

In Minneapolis, Bonnie Hildreth was one of the thousands of classroom paraprofessionals dealing with limited options for showing they were highly qualified, as mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act. Despite her 31 years as a classroom paraprofessional at Harrison Education Center, she was still left with the option of either passing an assessment or capturing 60 degree credits. As she began to explore the second option, Hildreth took advantage of ER&D training, which would satisfy the credit requirement in her district. Not only did ER&D save her the cost of college courses, it also offered the type of practical classroom application that Hildreth found so appealing. In fact, although she ultimately took and passed the assessment that satisfied her NCLB requirement, Hildreth remained involved in ER&D and is currently considering an opportunity to become a trainer in ER&D’s course that deals with nonviolent crisis prevention.

“The instructors were wonderful, and the class was fast moving,” she says of her ER&D training. “Teaching assistants share and learn new strategies and come back to tell how it worked” in the classroom. “I would recommend these classes to anyone.”

And ER&D not only is helping individual educators navigate current mandates in education but also helping faculty at entire schools take control of their future when it comes to school improvement and accountability. At Milner school in Hartford, Conn., a preK-6 building serving one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, ER&D provided an avenue for teachers to construct a solid school improvement plan. Fourth-grade teacher Travis Works attended an ER&D summer training session on Thinking Mathematics two years ago and found that some of the strategies he learned helped him turn some students who hated math into some of his best students at Milner.

“I talked to my principal about the great things I saw and approached [the Hartford Federation of Teachers] about training everyone in our building,” he says. Ultimately school staff were allowed to choose two ER&D strands, Thinking Mathematics and Instructional Strategies, as the foundation for their school improvement efforts at Milner, which is still struggling to meet adequate yearly progress mandates under NCLB. The weaknesses in NCLB benchmarks are real, Works says, but there’s no question that the ER&D approach is giving Milner staff a chance to make circumstances work in their favor by making changes that will really benefit children. Educators “had the opportunity to buy into what they wanted instead of having it shoved down their throats,” says Works, who is currently on half-day release at the school as an ER&D Thinking Math trainer and is also involved on several committees for the Hartford Federation of Teachers.

In terms of his own development as a teacher and a unionist, Works has little doubt about the role ER&D has played. “Once you understand that the union is all about increasing our professionalism, it becomes a point of pride.”