Steve McDougall, the president of the Early Childhood/TK-12 Council and a member of Salinas Valley Federation of Teachers Local 1020, started a new set of trainings this year. But these aren’t your typical union ones on subjects like contract bargaining or learning how to run a political campaign. Instead, members are doing professional development trainings for other members.

McDougall got the idea from his work on AFT councils. He thinks this is a way to offer members something helpful as well as a good organizing tool.

“We want to give something back to the average rank and file member that they can use on the job,” he said. “Of course, it’s also an opportunity to engage these folks in the union so that, hopefully, they become even more activated in the future.”

The trainings include subjects like social/emotional learning for early childhood educators, literacy, co-teaching students with disabilities in the mainstream, generative AI, and ethnic studies.

Megan Mitchell, a sixth-grade teacher in the ABC Unified School District, has been doing trainings herself in Universal Design for Learning, which offers multiple pathways for learners in order to eliminate educational barriers.

Mitchell, who has a Master’s degree in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles, says she has found professional development by peers infinitely more valuable than hearing from someone who is speaking theoretically.

“What those people present for us is like, ‘This is the model of what you should do.’ And it’s like, ‘This would be perfect if all of my learners were all in the same spot,’” she said. “Whereas the AFT and the CFT professional learning is done by people who are still actively in the classroom. They’re able to tell us specifically, ‘On Monday, when I did this with my students, this is how I did X, Y and Z. This is how I differentiate when I’m scaffolding for my newcomers or my multilingual learners.’”

These kinds of conversations and examples make the trainings much more effective, so that a workshop she had in reading and writing techniques for 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th graders, was one she could immediately apply to her older students, she says.

“It doesn’t just give me the tool, but it gives me the directions with how to use the tool,” she said. “Sometimes professional learning feels like giving a three-year-old a hammer.  We have this tool, and we know it’s a hammer and a hammer can do good things, but unless we know how to apply the skill of using a hammer, we just are just holding a hammer in our hands.”

Soon Mitchell will lead professional development sessions for her peers. Gabrielle DeVilla, a member of Salinas Valley Federation of Teachers and an educational technologist, has already started doing trainings in AI. A member of the state’s Department of Education’s AI Workgroup, she conducted a training for CFT members in Sacramento earlier this year and has also presented at the AFT national conference. 

DeVilla says she likes both keeping other educators informed and doing the trainings in AI, which she finds challenging since it’s uncharted territory. She says she wants others not to be afraid of it.

“I’m a skeptic myself. I’m not all gung-ho for AI, and I think I take a more calculated, careful approach to it,” she said. “But the more you know about AI, you can, as a union member, help influence contract language around it and what you would like to see happen.”

DeVilla says she’s lucky that they offer a lot of trainings in her local. Like Mitchell, she thinks union members offering professional development to peers is a real benefit.

“I think it strengthens the union.  It brings us together,” she said. “It keeps us united.”