Training through AFT's ER&D program brings teachers more pay and clout

Theo Harris was attending a training session for local union presidents a few winters ago when he started hearing about a professional development program the AFT had created for members. “I couldn’t wait to get back and take advantage of it for our schools,” he says.

Several schools in his Florida district had been labeled “in need of improvement” under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and as president of the Palm Beach Classroom Teachers Association, Harris was on a quest for some way to improve students’ academic achievement.

The former high school career counselor decided to fold a proposal to try the AFT’s Educational Research and Dissemination (ER&D) program into the union’s next contract negotiations, and in spring 2006, the district agreed to launch a two-year pilot program at six low-performing schools: two elementary, two middle and two high schools. Teachers agreed to a longer school day and year in exchange for additional pay and training. This past school year, that translated into an 8.5-hour workday, plus five more days for student instruction and five more days for professional development, with three of those dedicated to ER&D.

Courses in “Foundations of Effective Teaching” and reading instruction for about 400 staff members began in summer 2006 and continued throughout the school year, mostly on Saturdays. In the merged AFT/NEA local, the AFT provided five ER&D national trainers drawn from a pool of trainers around the country. Harris won an NEA urban grant that paid for about 15 local trainers, and the district allocated about $79,000 for 2005-07 to cover trainers and materials.

This summer, the pilot program continued, focusing on “Instructional Strategies That Work” for the staffs of all six participating schools. Other courses to follow over this school year will cover the home-school connection, math and managing anti-social behavior. Harris is now busy gathering results of the pilot’s first year while at the same time negotiating for the next phase.

Christina Phillips, a reading specialist at Pleasant City Elementary School, says that beyond expanding teachers’ knowledge base, ER&D has helped them earn state reading credentials.

“They absolutely loved it,” she says, noting that the reading course offered techniques they hadn’t learned in college. They also liked how the course was spread out over Saturdays so they could go back and try new things.

The longer school days “allowed us to have some professional conversations,” Phillips adds, and having teachers they already knew conduct the training raised the level of trust. That personal connection gave the course validity and “made it real,” she says.

Phillips admits that she’s not usually impressed with professional development in reading, but says, “I’ll take this one.”

A culture of continuous learning

Once teachers at the six schools dug into the program, Harris saw them gain solid, nuts-and-bolts skills. Novice teachers learned new ways to structure their classrooms. Experienced teachers received “an affirmation of what they’d been doing, but also why—a rationale—and how to apply it even better,” Harris explains.

Especially in the reading course, “for most of the people, it was a lot of new information,” he says. Secondary teachers often are not trained extensively in how to teach reading, so the course provides something for everyone.

“The overarching element that makes this so powerful is that we’re training full staffs together—the whole staff. Everybody gets the training,” he says.

With continued support from his school district, Harris wants to get ER&D firmly established as part of a culture of continuous learning. “If we have teachers with improved skills in front of the classroom, they’ll do a better job.”

Early results look promising. After only one year of ER&D training, the teachers at Pleasant City saw their students’ test scores rise. The school’s own score in the Florida evaluation system, which is linked with NCLB, catapulted from a D to an A.

“It was a combination of things, of course,” says Harris, “but ER&D was a big part of it.”