The Wachovia Teachers and Teaching Initiative
The Lastinger Center was honored to receive a $1,000,000 Wachovia Teachers and Teaching Initiative grant to develop a new model to improve teacher practice in Florida. Drawing on a wealth of professional development research and a set of standards and practices widely embraced by a diverse group of leading state and national educational organizations, the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning, with the support of the Wachovia Teachers and Teaching Initiative, launched an ambitious and far-reaching effort to improve the quality of teaching, learning, and leadership in high need elementary schools.
Initiated in 2004, the Lastinger Center – Wachovia Teachers and Teaching Initiative seeks to raise the academic achievement of students in under-resourced elementary schools, particularly schools serving substantial numbers of children with linguistic and cultural diversity by:
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Creating a replicable, measurable, sustainable, and scaleable professional development model for improving teaching practice and student performance.
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Developing a network of under-resourced elementary schools that demonstrate the effectiveness of – and serve as training grounds for – building learning communities that yield substantial improvements in student achievement.
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Designing and building a reliable, efficient, and effective measurement model to capture the impact of professional development.
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Developing plans to disseminate the project's approach to a larger number of schools and districts.
As the project enters its fourth year, it is on track to achieve its major objectives. Our team of teachers, principals, school district curriculum specialists, educational researchers, professors-in-residence, representatives from professional educational organizations, and measurement specialists from the public and private sector have worked collaboratively to:
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Implement and fine-tune a research-based professional development model to improve student achievement, teacher practice, principal leadership, and school culture.
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Form a group of under-resourced urban elementary schools in Jacksonville, Miami, Immokalee and Gainesville that are working together to implement the project’s job-embedded professional development model.
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Select 275 Florida Teacher Fellows to participate in an intensive, year-long professional development experience.
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Offer two 3-day Professional Development Residential Institutes on the campus of the University of Florida for faculties to examine research-based practices to improve achievement, analyze student data and use it to design teacher professional development activities.
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Provide more than 50 3-hour Florida Teacher Fellows Professional Development Seminars.
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Host 2-day Florida Principal Fellows Retreats for the leaders of our partner schools.
Our accountability team has built a measurement model that captures the impact of professional development on teacher practice, student learning, and school culture.
Each of these milestones are small victories, but combined they represent a major achievement:
The Wachovia Teachers and Teaching Initiative has brought together a diverse and talented group of individuals from various educational, government, and private sector organizations to set aside institutional boundaries and work collaboratively to co-construct and co-implement a well-conceptualized approach to improving achievement and educator practice in some of our state’s most under-resourced schools.
