About the UF Lastinger Center
The Lastinger Center for Learning is an education design-and-build shop. We harness the University of Florida’s extraordinary intellectual resources to partner with school districts, philanthropies, governmental entities and the private sector to create, field-test and disseminate innovations and models that transform teaching, improve learning and promote healthy child development.
Housed at the University of Florida College of Education, the Lastinger Center blends the latest research with effective practice to build award-winning learning systems and programs that boost teaching practice and advance student achievement.
Deeply committed to racial equity and championing educators and children in the most vulnerable schools, the Lastinger Center is increasingly recognized as an emerging leader in the teacher quality movement. We have won the U.S. Department of Education’s 2011 Investing in Innovation (i3) award; the 2011 Florida Association for Staff Development’s award for the state’s top professional development program; and the Association of Teacher Educators’ 2011 award for the country’s top teacher education partnership program.
The Lastinger Center designs and builds learning systems and programs that recharge teaching and learning. Our award-winning model sharpens educators’ skills, broadens and deepens knowledge, establishes effective communities of practice and helps students succeed.
The Lastinger Center’s innovations, prototypes and models, listed below, are in various stages of implementation, field-testing and state, national and international replication and dissemination:
- The Master Teacher Initiative. Creating a potential national model for innovative, on-the-job, cost-effective professional development. Read about this program and view a short documentary about it.
- National Early Childhood Learning Labs. Playing a key role in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s multi-state effort to boost early learning, school readiness and healthy child development. Read about the Learning Labs and lessons for successful early childhood education.
- Florida Professional Development System for Early Learning Educators. Joining the state Agency for Workforce Innovation and Department of Education to build a blended onsite/online approach for this eclectic group of practitioners. Explore our blended professional development.
- Teacher Leadership for School Improvement. Offering teachers in high-need schools a free, job-embedded University of Florida master’s or specialist’s degree. Read an overview, learn about joining the program, explore our early learning effort and check out the Ready Schools Miami initiative.
- Lastinger Community of Practice model. Convening and empowering teachers to take charge of improving their practice. Learn about our Communities of Practice.
- Online early learning professional development system. Building web-based platforms to bolster teacher practice and help improve student learning. Explore our method.
- Developing science and mathematics master teachers. Teaming up with the Helios Education Foundation to bolster this high-priority part of secondary education. Read about our STEM efforts.
- Secrets of Master Teachers series. Producing user-friendly publications filled with lessons from Florida’s top teachers. View Secrets of Success and Secrets of Professional Development.
- Ready Schools Florida. Working with The Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, the Children’s Trust, Miami-Dade Public School District and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to create what SRI International describes as one of the nation’s most radical systems-reform efforts. Read about Ready Schools Miami as a system of change.
- Leading and teaching for racial equity. Developing and facilitating programs to effectively address the issues that give rise to academic inequities. Learn about leveling the playing field.
- A national prototype for ensuring children’s oral health. Participating in a multi-organization creation of one of the nation’s top Pediatric Dental Residency programs, which will serve 14,000 children. View our study on child well-being in Collier County.
- The Lastinger Metrics of Child Well-Being. Using multiple indicators to provide communities with a measurement system to determine levels and types of risk to healthy child development. Check out a chart detailing metrics of child well-being.