The Florida Legislature consolidates higher education for teacher preparation into two schools – the University of Florida for men and the Florida State College for Women.

The Normal School is restructured as the UF Teachers College and Normal School, with John Thackston as its first dean.

The UF Teachers College and Normal School is renamed the College of Education.

The Florida Legislature makes both state universities (UF and Florida State University) coeducational, necessitating a broader program of teacher education.

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Accreditation (NCATE), in its founding year, grants accreditation to UF’s programs for teacher education.

In a decade of growth for both the College and P.K. Yonge, the laboratory school moves to its own new campus on a 37-acre plot near the university. The College, a leader in desegregation in the South, enrolls its first black student.

In a national survey of laboratory school administrators, P.K. Yonge School at UF is voted the nation’s best laboratory school.

A pioneer in the establishment of a required, five-year teacher education program, the College launches its groundbreaking ProTeach (professional teacher) master’s program, with a heightened emphasis on education research and hands-on classroom and field experiences.

Focused on the changing demographics in public schools and the movement to include students with disabilities in general education classes, a movement begins to consolidate UF’s teacher education programs in elementary and special education into a formal Unified Elementary Program. The new, unified ProTeach program would produce graduates eligible for elementary certification with an endorsement in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and with expertise in special education, or graduates with dual certification in special education and elementary education and the ESOL endorsement.

U.S. News and World Report rates UF’s counselor education program No. 1 in the nation in its specialty.

UF alumni Allen and Delores Lastinger contribute $2 million–the largest gift to the College to date–to drive efforts to wed cutting-edge education research and academic practice to improve teaching and accelerate learning.

With Don Pemberton as founding director, the vision of donors Allen and Delores Lastinger is realized with the launching of the Lastinger Center for Learning as the College’s education innovation and outreach hub. The Center quickly evolves into a marquee program for the college, partnering with educational organizations across the state and beyond to bring UF’s research-tested methods and intellectual resources to the front lines of public education.

Catherine Emihovich starts her nine-year tenure as UF’s 12th education dean and the College’s first woman dean. She immediately works with faculty to link the College’s innovative outreach initiatives under the rubric of the Scholarship of Engagement, an education model first promoted by noted educator Ernest Boyer. The SOE principle connects academic scholarship to the practical concerns of educators and work that contribute to the public good.

Retired COE emeritus professor of educational leadership, William Hedges, and his wife Robbie, commit $1.9 million for research to help marginal students learn and succeed.

The Office of Educational Research is established to improve the College’s research infrastructure and heighten support and development of sponsored, collaborative research by education faculty.

A shared $10 million grant teams the College’s Lastinger Center for Learning with Miami-Dade Public Schools and a prominent Miami foundation in an all-out school-readiness effort to prepare all Florida preschoolers for success by the time they enter the classroom.

The College leads UF’s drive to establish the University of Florida Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Studies. With a $1 million gift from UF education alumna Anita Zucker, the center becomes a research, training and model demonstration site where top UF scholars—in fields as diverse as education, medicine, law, public health and the life sciences—collaborate with local, state and national partners to advance the science and practice of early childhood development and early learning. Patricia Snyder becomes the center’s founding director.

The College is granted full, continued accreditation of its educator preparation programs by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Examiners cite exceptional strengths in faculty teaching and research, high-quality students, statewide outreach and school –improvement partnerships, and diversity efforts in faculty and student recruitment.

To better prepare its teachers-in-training, the Unified Elementary ProTeach program year introduces the yearlong internship as the culminating experience for teacher candidates in their graduate year of the five-year program.

The College improves 18 places to 24th in the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of America’s Best Graduate Education Schools. UF’s College of Education is Florida’s highest ranking education school, is No. 1 among public education colleges in the Southeastern Conference and is UF’s highest ranked graduate school in any discipline. The College also has four academic programs ranked in the Top 20 nationally: special education (4th), student counseling/personnel services (9th), elementary education (18th) and curriculum and instruction (19th).

The U.S. Department of Education awards a grant worth $25 million over five years to UF special education scholars Mary Brownell, Paul Sindelar and Erica McCray to establish a landmark, 20-state program charged with transforming professional standards and the preparation of teachers serving students with disabilities. The award — leading to the creation of the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development and Accountability and Reform, also known as the CEEDAR Center — is the College’s largest grant ever.

Aiming to bring teacher education into the 21st century, the College converts a vintage 1979 reading clinic in Norman Hall into a prototype “smart” classroom, where professors incorporate the latest education technology into their teacher preparation instruction.

P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School, the College’s laboratory school since 1934, opens its new, beyond-state-of-the-art elementary wing. Experts describe the building’s “learning community” set-up as a national model for school building design in the 21st century.

UF’s historic, five-year Florida Tomorrow capital campaign concludes, with generous alumni and supporters contributing nearly $30 million to the College of Education—the College’s most successful fundraising campaign ever.

COE 1965 graduate Delores Lastinger, a leading Northeast Florida civic leader, philanthropist and former high school teacher, is recognized as a 2012 University of Florida Distinguished Alumna.

The Florida Department of Education awards $2 million to the College to create STEM-Teacher Induction and Professional Support, also known as STEM-TIPS, a statewide professional development support system for new science and math teachers in their first two years on the job. The “teacher induction” effort is aimed at reversing the lack of support that historically drives nearly one-third of new science and math teachers from the classroom by their third year of teaching.

Alumnus Eric Grunder (MEd ’94) is one of seven educators across the country to receive the 2012 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching in a spring ceremony at the White House.

UF’s interdisciplinary Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Studies is renamed for education alumna Anita Zucker in recognition of her $5 million donation — the College’s largest gift ever by an individual — to expand the growth and outreach of the center’s programs in early learning and the healthy development of our youngest children.

The dual certification track of the COE’s Unified Elementary ProTeach program becomes one of the first teacher prep programs in the nation to receive accreditation from the International Dyslexia Association.

Film crews from two major online education outlets — Harvard University and Edutopia.org — visit the campus of UF’s P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School to film the laboratory school’s novel K-12 teaching and learning methods and record activities of the learning communities supported by the architectural design of its new elementary building.

Four philanthropic foundations contribute a combined $4 million to support the UF Lastinger Center’s creation of Early Learning Florida, a first-of-its-kind, online professional development platform for Florida’s 55,000 early learning educators. The spinoff benefit will be improved learning and development for hundreds of thousands of young children by providing new tools and resources to build the skills of early learning professionals.

The College’s national standing continues to rise after earning four No. 1 ratings in the U.S. News & World Report magazine’s annual rankings of America’s Best Graduate Programs in Education. UF is the highest ranked education school in Florida and among public schools in the Southeastern United States. The College also received top billing for it online graduate program in education, and received the nation’s highest score for online student selectivity — considered a benchmark indicating the high quality of students enrolled.

COE prominent scholar Maureen Conroy is chosen as UF’s first Anita Zucker Professor in Early Childhood Studies. Conroy is a key player in one of the College’s and UF’s core research priorities to advance the practices and policies of early childhood development and learning.

Since its inception in 2011 with funding from the National Science Foundation, the College’s U-FUTuRES master’s degree program graduates 37 practicing middle-school science teachers who mastered intensive instruction on teaching a new and powerful, hands-on curriculum with demonstrated promise for increasing student engagement. With their new designation as Science Teacher Leaders, the graduates return to their schools and districts to pass on what they learn to hundreds of other teachers in 20 Florida school districts, impacting thousands of students . . . With the five-year NSF grant completed, the Science Teacher Leader program is rebranded as U-FUTuRES 2.0 and transformed into a one-year accelerated certificate program.

College of Education faculty hold $97 million in external research awards–an all-time high. The College’s external funding doubles in value over the past five years. A major award is a $9 million federal grant to create a Precision Education Virtual Learning Lab to test novel approaches for advancing and personalizing online and multimedia instruction.