Pengfei Zhao, assistant professor in the School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education, has been named a recipient of the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2021 year.
Zhihui Fang, professor of literacy and language education and an Irving & Rose Fien Endowed Professor of Education in the School of Teaching and Learning, has released his fifth book, “Demystifying Academic Writing.” The book focuses on the rhetorical moves, cognitive skills and linguistic strategies needed to write clearly, fluently, coherently and effectively for academic purposes.
Undergraduate Teacher of the Year is awarded to faculty who excel in the classroom. Brown feels that despite the transition to emergency remote learning in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, she was able to cultivate connections with her students and foster a transformative academic experience.
Members of the academy are selected across UF colleges and academic disciplines.
Kakali Bhattacharya, professor in the School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education,was honored with the 2021 Distinguished Contribution to Research and Scholarship Award by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) Asian Pacific Islander Knowledge Community (APIKC).
The Council for Exceptional Children Division for Research recognized two University of Florida College of Education faculty — Patricia Snyder and Nicholas Gage — as distinguished researchers.
Research from members of the UF Counselor Education program featured in four articles in the October 2020 issue of Counseling and Values.
The National Science Foundation has awarded $299,624 to Maya Israel, associate professor of educational technology, and a team of computer science education leaders to explore ways to expand inclusion in CS education for students with disabilities.
The Institute of Higher Education (IHE) at the University of Florida received $600,000 from the National Science Foundation to enhance access and success among underrepresented students in community college Information Technology (IT) programs.
Mary Brownell, professor of Special Education and director of the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform (CEEDAR) Center, was named a University of Florida Distinguished Professor.
Kakali Bhattacharya, professor in the School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education, was recently recognized with the University of Georgia Mary Frances Early College of Education Distinguished Alumni Award.
Preparing students in online literacy education and practice is becoming increasingly important as children grow up in an overwhelmingly digital world. Angela Kohnen, the most recent recipient of the B.O. Smith Professorship, hopes to create a comprehensive curriculum to ensure our students are prepared for their futures in an inevitably online world.
For more than 22 years, Professor Zhihui Fang has been impacting students at the University of Florida. With his recent endowment of the Irving and Rose Fien Professorship, he hopes to use his research to transform the way teachers approach reading and writing in content area subjects, a common struggle for many K-12 educators.
With a vision to empower faculty, staff and students to prioritize equitable outcomes for learners, families and communities, associate professor Erica McCray became director of the School of Special Education, School Psychology and Early Childhood Studies (SESPECS) in October 2019.
This International Education Week we are highlighting assistant professor Pengfei Zhao and her study on ethical approval in East Asian countries.
Two University of Florida faculty were recently honored at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Florida Educational Research Association.
F. Chris Curran, associate professor of educational leadership and policy, has been named recipient of the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2019 year. This fellowship is one of the highest honors for those early in their career in higher education.
Justin Ortagus, director of the Institute of Higher Education and assistant professor of Higher Education & Policy, who received $373,590 in co-funding to analyze how variations in performance-based funding policies impact outcomes for underserved students and under-resourced institutions. The grants serves as Phase Two of a two-part project to identify the impact of PBF policy design elements on college access and student success.
Four faculty members within the UF College of Education have recently published textbooks. Three of the faculty members focused their publications on bilingual students and the variety of needs that they have within schools, one addresses school finance.
The University of Florida has awarded Patricia Snyder with the rare honor of Distinguished Professor. Snyder is only the seventh College of Education professor to ever receive this distinction.
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) presented the Best Paper Award in the special interest group category of “Computer and Internet Applications in Education” to a multidisciplinary team of faculty and graduate students.
Cryptography has been used for thousands of years to conceal covert messages, but researchers believe it may serve another purpose — to help children become successful readers and writers.
Elizabeth “Buffy” Bondy, professor in the School of Teaching and Learning, was recently appointed to serve on the esteemed University of Florida Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars — an advisory group dedicated to enhancing the policies that maintain the university’s high-quality of academic excellence.
Professor in the School of Teaching and Learning Nancy Fichtman Dana was named one of five University of Florida faculty members honored with the 2019 Faculty Doctoral Mentoring Award.
Patricia Snyder, director of the Anita Zucker Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Studies, and Nicholas Gage, assistant professor of special education, were awarded Reviewer of the Year by Exceptional Children, the nation’s most respected scholarly journal in special education.
Dr. Justin Ortagus, director of the Institute of Higher Education (IHE) and assistant professor of higher education & policy, and a team of researchers were awarded $204,528 from the William T. Grant Foundation to construct a comprehensive state-by-state data set of performance-based funding (PBF) policies across the nation.
Walter Leite, professor of research and evaluation methodology, has been recognized as the 2018 Educational Researcher of the Year by the Florida Educational Research Association (FERA).
Christopher Busey, assistant professor of curriculum, teaching and teacher education, serves as CUFA program chair engaging scholars from across the Americas in critical conversations that shape the field of social studies education.
The University of Florida Site-based Implementation of Teacher Education (SITE) program has been recognized as an outstanding teacher education program and was selected to receive the Innovation in Teacher Education Award by the Southeastern Regional Association of Teacher Educators (SRATE).
Bilingual Ed. scholar Maria Coady fills a prestigious endowed Fien professorship that allows her to expand her landmark multilingual studies aimed at helping at-risk English language learners at rural high-poverty schools.
Faculty member John Super and two students in UF’s nationally ranked Counselor Education program have been elected officers of the Florida Association for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues in Counseling (FALGBTIC).
COE faculty scholars Albert Ritzhaupt and Cynthia Griffin have been awarded editorships of leading research journals in their respective disciplines. Alumna Melinda Leko (PhD ’08) also landed a editorship alongside Griffin, her former UF professor.
Don Pemberton has accomplished serious improvement in the lives of children. This year he is retiring, and in his wake he leaves successful institutions, impactful innovations, and hordes of individuals all inspired to continue Don’s vision forward.
UF has honored Justin Ortagus, a faculty researcher in Higher Ed Administration and Policy, with its 2018 Excellence Award for Assistant Professors. He also is the new director of the UF Institute of HIgher Education.
To 3D or not to 3D? College instructors in chemistry and other science disciplines are debating whether it’s best to use traditional, two-dimensional renderings of basic structures like organic molecules and crystals, or to adopt new technology that can render images of molecular structures in three dimensions.
Special Education professor Stephen W. Smith, one of the College’s most prolific researchers and federal grant generators, has been chosen to receive the Distinguished Researcher Award from the Special Education Research special interest group of the American Educational Research Association.
Shelley Warm, senior lecturer and Site-based Implementation of Teacher Education (SITE) program director, has been honored as Florida’s Outstanding Teacher Educator of the Year by the Florida Association of Teacher Educators (FATE). The Mary L. Collins award recognizes dedication to the field of teacher education and advocate of high-quality education.
Prof. Mary Brownell is feted twice for leading reform efforts in Special Education teacher preparation.
John Michael Newell, Ph.D., 91, a professor emeritus of educational psychology and a 30-year member of the graduate faculty at the UF College of Education, passed away Sunday, June 11, in Gainesville. He was a longtime instructor in the Department of Foundations of Education and served as acting director of the unit for two years in 1981-1983.
Shon D. Smith, clinical assistant professor in Counselor Education, has recently drawn national attention in his field for two major achievements involving separate divisions of the American Counseling Association (ACA).
Henry “Hank” Frierson, associate vice president and dean of the Graduate School at the University of Florida with a faculty appointment at the College of Education, has received the Presidential Citation from the American Educational Research Association.
UF education technology researcher Pavlo “Pasha” Antonenko adjusts his EEG headwear on a study subject.
UF education technology researcher Pavlo “Pasha” Antonenko has never been afraid to take risks and go against convention. His pioneering spirit emerged in the 1990s in his Ukraine homeland, where personal computers were scarce and there was no internet connection. Fast forward two decades, to today, and you’ll find him leading groundbreaking studies at the College of Education on a radical new approach for advancing and personalizing the still-fledgling field of online learning.
SETTING THE STAGE
Antonenko’s journey to UF started in the late 1990s when he was a high school teacher. He became fascinated with computers at a time when his hometown of Nizhyn, Ukraine had no internet connections and few computers. He began building and selling computers to supplement his income while he earned a master’s in linguistics in English and German languages.
“I was one of the first people in my hometown to get an internet connection, but it wasn’t very good. I started building websites even before I had internet, but they were just sitting on my computer,” he recalls.
His career path changed dramatically in 2002 when he traveled to Orlando to work as an interpreter at a conference on education technology, a discipline that wasn’t even recognized in Ukraine. But Antonenko had found his passion: exploring ways computer technology can improve education.
“Everything I heard there and the people I met, I said ‘wow, this is what I want to do as my graduate education and job,’” he says.
Within a few months, he and his wife, Yuliya, moved a half-world away to settle in Ames, Iowa, where he spent five years at Iowa State University earning a doctorate in curriculum and instructional technology and human-computer interaction.
Along the way, Antonenko worked with Iowa State neuroscientists on one of his personal research interests—the use of electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain activity known as “cognitive load,” which is the amount of mental effort expended by the working memory during a learning task. EEG, which records the brain’s electrical activity, is most commonly used in medicine as a first-line, non-invasive method of diagnosing stroke and other brain disorders.
It would have been intriguing to monitor Antonenko’s own brain activity as he thought to himself, “Hmmm, I wonder if EEG might be a reliable way to study the mental processes underlying learning.” He wrote his dissertation on the topic and became one of the first education researchers to use EEG to measure the cognitive dynamics of learning.
The stars begin to align
After earning his doctorate and serving five years on the education technology faculty at Oklahoma State University, Antonenko joined UF’s ed. tech faculty in 2012. His appointment coincided with the education world’s identification of personalizing online learning as a global challenge and a top research priority of the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation.
UF administrators also targeted research of personalized e-learning for investment of state “preeminent university” funds, which enabled the College of Education in 2014 to recruit top ed. tech scholar Carole Beal from Arizona State University, where she was conducting her own pioneering neuro-education studies. Beal became the first director of UF’s new campuswide Online Learning Institute.
The College of Education made a priority of integrating neuroscience with education research to improve online learning at all levels. Pivotal developments during the 2015-16 academic year made that push a certainty.
UF Education Technology Professor Kara Dawson
Merging Neuroscience and education research at UF
In 2015, Antonenko, Beal and UF education technology colleague Kara Dawson attracted vital grant funding to lead novel interdisciplinary research projects using wireless EEG brain monitoring and other neuro-technology to study how multimedia learning can be impoved for all students, not just those who test well on academic exams. These studies focus on education in the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering and math—areas in which the use of multimedia learning tools “has far outstripped the ability of research to keep pace with,” says Antonenko.
Their focus on custom-tailoring instructional design for individual learner differences, rather than a “one-size-fits-all” approach, is a distinctive feature of their studies.
“Virtually all research on multimedia learning methods has been performed on high-achieving students at elite research-intensive universities, where studies like this usually occur. We are evaluating these methods with more diverse student populations and those with special needs,” Antonenko says.
NSF study focuses on community college students
Antonenko heads a team of highly specialized researchers drawn from multiple institutions on a three-year study, supported by a $765,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The researchers are gauging how effective technology-assisted learning practices are for a diverse group of community college students, which now constitute nearly half of all U.S. higher education students.
The team, dubbed the Science of Learning Collaborative Network, includes top scholars in education technology, neuroscience, STEM education, neuropsychology, computer science and educational measurement. They hail from UF, the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Washington State University.
Some 120 students from three colleges—Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and SUNY Buffalo State in Buffalo, N.Y.—are participating in the study. The students are screened for demographics and learning differences, such as working memory and visual attention levels, to ensure a varied test group.
Team specialists in cognitive neuroscience are employing EEG and other high-tech methods, including functional near infrared spectroscopy (to measure neural changes in blood oxygenation) and eye tracking (to understand visual attention) to assess the students’ attention and mental processes while they learn using multimedia materials that include text, images, videos, animations and audio.
The researchers hope to land follow-up NSF grants by demonstrating the effectiveness of their network’s organization, infrastructure and integration of diverse research strategies, along with their unique approach to personalized learning.
“Working with scholars from other disciplines and other institutions is really exciting but it’s also challenging because each discipline and each person has a different way to work,” Antonenko says. “We have to make sure everyone is invested and feels valued and make sure we pull all of the expertise together in a way that makes sense.”
UF co-researchers are ed. tech faculty members Dawson and Beal, and psychology professor Andreas Keil. Co-principal investigators are computer science and STEM education scholars Matthew Schneps from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Marc Pomplun from the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and Richard Lamb of SUNY Buffalo State, who focuses on science education and measurement.
Adapting digital media for students with dyslexia
Professor Dawson heads an educational neuroscience study focused on multimedia learning for students with dyslexia, the most common language-based disability. People with dyslexia typically have difficulty reading and processing words.
Dawson was awarded $85,000 for the one-year project from UF’s Office of Research, which awards Research Opportunity Seed Fund grants to UF scholars for the merit and potential of their research proposals. Antonenko is a co-principal investigator.
The study involves 72 college students with dyslexia, each participating in one of four multimedia learning settings while wearing wireless EEG headsets to monitor and record brain activity during the multimedia exercise and comprehension assessment. The student volunteers are drawn from four institutions: Santa Fe Community College and the universities of Central Florida, North Florida and South Florida.
While neuroscience-based methods are central to the study, Dawson is quick to make one thing clear: “In no way am I a neuroscientist.”
“To me, this is not about neuroscience,” she says, “I am interested in what neuroscience techniques can tell us about the learning process. That is what it’s all about for me.”
Dawson and her team will use their findings to evaluate the validity of merging EEG and behavioral measures and, ultimately, to develop new instructional strategies and materials that teachers can personalize for individual students with varied learning traits and backgrounds.
Besides Dawon and Antonenko, the research team includes UF ed. tech colleagues Beal and Albert Ritzhaupt, dyslexia diagnostic specialist Linda Lombardino from UF’s special education program, and UF neuropsychologist Keil. Doctoral students participating are Kendra Saunders from school pyschology and Nihan Dogan, Jiahui Wang, Li Cheng, Wenjing Luo and Robert Davis from the School of Teaching and Learning. Matthew Schneps from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicists also is collaborating.
“We all share this mutual goal of figuring out how technology can help all types of learners,” Dawson says. “We need to make technology work so everyone feels they can learn and be smart and successful.”
MUCH PROMISE BUT NOT YET READY FOR PRIME TIME
The researchers describe both educational neuroscience studies as exploratory, but Antonenko says he expects them to yield solid preliminary findings that may lead to follow-up NSF research proposals.
“EEG appears to be a great tool for educational research that can produce important implications for teaching and learning in education.” he says. “Our focus is on helping people who need additional support as they learn using 21st century online and multimedia tools in education.”
“That is what I find most rewarding.”
WRITER: Larry Lansford, communications director, UF College of Education; 352-273-4137; llansford@coe.ufl.edu
John Super (center) watches the news with other volunteers in the LGBT Center in Orlando after the Pulse nightclub shooting.
Several months have passed since a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in what was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history — a horrific tragedy the likes of which rarely strikes so close to the University of Florida.
While the trauma of the lives lost will long linger in the minds of survivors, family and friends of the victims, the aftermath also has brought the Orlando community together in a cause for hope and unity. Citizens donated blood, stood together on social media and held vigils.
They were supported by sympathizers across Florida and the country, including a contingent of students and faculty members from UF College of Education who personally visited Orlando to assist in the communitywide effort to provide counseling and mental health care to those affected by the deadly shooting.
“This event had a huge impact on me as a counselor, a student and a person,” said Rachel Henesy, a UF doctoral student in counselor education. “On a personal and professional level, I felt a responsibility to help in any way possible.”
About 30 UF volunteers
The UF effort was spearheaded by John Super, a clinical assistant professor of counselor education, who in the days after the tragedy helped recruit and organize about 30 UF counselors and students to travel to Orlando for one-on-one counseling sessions. They helped people coping with intense feelings — such as loss, anger and fear, provided referrals to local licensed therapists and served as an emotional outlet for those experiencing their darkest days.
It has been said that out of deep pain and grief there is hope and opportunity. That is what Super found when he asked his UF students and peers from around the state to contribute to the volunteer counseling efforts.
“In the beginning, there was a moment where I thought I could either volunteer or not,” Super said. “But I knew I had to do something, and at that moment I had no idea the magnitude the tragedy would become.”
Super worked with local volunteer counseling coordinators, including David Baker-Hargrove and Lindsay Kincaide of Two Spirit Health Services in Orlando, to develop a response plan. He also coordinated with Alicia Homrich, a professor of graduate studies in counseling at Rollins College in Winter Park, who provided resources and also recruited Rollins students, Kincaide said.
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of Central Florida served as the base of operations, with other free counseling locations established throughout the Orlando area, including LGBT-friendly bars. All told, nearly 700 people — ranging from licensed counselors, psychologists, pet therapists, interpreters and social workers — volunteered their time in the days and weeks following the shooting to assist hundreds of people from June 12 to July 4, Kincaide said.
Ties to the LGBT community
Super was well equipped to help with the grassroots counseling efforts. He has master’s in marriage and family therapy and a Ph.D. in counselor education from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and has ties to Orlando’s LGBT Community Center. He also has Red Cross training in disaster response for mental health care and has conducted research in the identity development of LGBT individuals.
In the days after the tragedy, Super tapped his counseling connections, Orlando ties and experience in crisis intervention counseling to help address the widespread grief and fear of area residents — including a large contingent of the gay and Hispanic communities. He posted information on social media sites and sent emails to UF students and counselors asking for their help. Most not only were willing to volunteer but also shared his message to recruit others.
Though so many felt shock and heartbreak, Super said he witnessed a tremendous amount of goodness, too. He saw graduate students counsel those affected by the tragedy, and he encouraged conversation among the students to share their stories and feelings, and learn from each other’s experiences.
“I experienced such an outpouring from master’s and doctoral students who were willing to give their time and really put themselves out there driving from Gainesville to Orlando every day,” he said. “They put their own feelings and grief aside in order to help those who most needed it.”
Henesy, the UF doctoral student in counselor education, said she was grateful that Super was able to assess what was needed and get UF students and his peers involved.
Another counselor education doctoral student, Philip Daniels, said the College of Education gave him the foundation and confidence to provide the support needed for those processing the event.
“One of the first thoughts that went through my head was competency,” Daniels said. “I asked myself, ‘can I really do this?’ Then, it dawned on me. This is what I am trained for. This was a moment when everything I have learned came together so I could serve others in their time of need.”
Super said LGBT counseling has long been a staple of UF’s counseling education curriculum. Diversity and social justice is weaved into all of the counselor education courses, and LGBT issues are addressed through role-playing and discussions in every foundational class and clinical experience.
“Historically, we were one of the first several counselor education programs in the nation,” Super said. “We’ve always had a strong social justice focus that is supported by the college and our profession.”
Source: John Super, UF College of Education; 352-273-4325; jsuper@coe.ufl.edu
Writer: Kelsie Ozanne, news and communications office, UF College of Education; kozanne@ufl.edu
Media Relations: Larry Lansford, director, news and communications, UF College of Education; 352-273-4173; llansford@coe.ufl.edu
The UF College of Education appointed a half-dozen professors to the college’s full-time faculty this year. The appointments were in special education (two), the Anita Zucker Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Studies, ESOL/bilingual education, higher education and administration, and research and evaluation methodology (two).
The mini-profiles below can help you get better acquainted with our new faculty:
Amber Benedict, visiting assistant professor in special education
Vivian Gonsalves, visiting clinical assistant professor in special education
Herman Knopf, research scientist in the Anita Zucker Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Studies
Jo Kozuma, lecturer in ESOL/bilingual education
Kelli Peck Parrott, clinical full professor higher education administration
Anne Seraphine, clinical assistant professor in research and evaluation methodology and coordinator of a new master of arts in education degree in Program Evaluation for Educational Environments.
Writer: Charles Boisseau, 352-273-4449
The world’s largest organization of educators committed to advancing English language teaching for non-English speaking students has installed a UF College of Education professor and school director as its president-elect.
Ester de Jong, professor of ESOL/bilingual education and director of the college’s School of Teaching and Learning, has assumed the penultimate leadership post for TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) International Association and is on track to become the group’s president at the TESOL convention in Seattle in March 2017.
TESOL is a professional community of more than 12,500 members—educators, researchers, administrators and students—representing 156 countries.
“Teaching English to English learners involves many complex issues, with equity and access, technology use and multilingualism playing important roles,” de Jong said. “TESOL is in a unique position to advocate for professionalism in English teaching around the world that is responsive to these global trends.”
De Jong said she values the personal and professional opportunity her leadership role in TESOL offers as a forum for shaping and sharing the group’s important message.
“One of my goals is to raise awareness of the multilingual realities in which English teaching and learning takes place and how it contributes to developing bilingual multilingual competence for speakers from diverse backgrounds,” she said.
In addition to her UF appointment as STL director, de Jong continues to be involved in teaching and research projects related to language policy, bilingual education and mainstream teacher preparation for bilingual learners. In 2013 she received the Award for Excellence in Research on Bilingual Education from the National Association of Two-Way and Dual Language Education. She is widely published in peer-reviewed academic journals on bilingual and language education and policy and has published a book titled “Foundations of Multilingualism in Education: From Principles to Practice,” which focuses on working with multilingual children in K-12 schools.
De Jong also was the lead investigator on a recently completed, seven-year study, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, to assess and advance the teaching of English language learners in Florida’s public schools. She is currently a co-principal investigator on a Florida Department of Education grant involving the creation of a Center of Excellence in Elementary Teacher Preparation at UF’s College of Education.
De Jong has an Ed.D. in literacy, language and cultural studies from Boston University and joined the UF education faculty in 2001.
SOURCE: Ester de Jong, 352-273-4227 ; edejong@coe.ufl.edu
WRITER: Larry Lansford, communications director, UF College of Education; 352-273-4137; llansford@coe.ufl.edu
Mary Brownell
The University of Florida Foundation has selected education professor Mary Brownell to receive one of just two grants given annually to university faculty members to advance their critical research projects.
Brownell, a leading scholar and policy expert in special education and teacher preparation, said the $25,000 UF Foundation Term Professorship Award would allow her to develop ways of improving the practices of new teachers and interns, especially for teaching students with disabilities.
UF created the special three-year award in 2013 to support Florida’s overall goal of becoming a preeminent global university by addressing complex societal issues. It is given annually to two research professors.
Brownell said the award would help her work on two related projects.
First, she and her research assistants will develop a digital assessment tool to allow faculty members to better evaluate the learning opportunities education students have when they work as teaching assistants in K-12 schools.
“The problem is that we assume school-based experiences improve teaching. Yet, we really do not know what it is about these that make them effective,” Brownell said. “If we are going to improve teaching, we need to better understand the aspects that work best.
“With this assessment tool you’ll be able to examine the best practices and link those back to teacher and student performance.”
Secondly, she wants to work with education technology colleagues to tap virtual technology in a fresh way to improve teacher practice. This would involve the use of video and simulations of specific practices of effective teachers.
She said such tools are underused in the education field though they are becoming widespread in training students in other professions, such as medicine, nursing and information sciences.
Brownell said she felt honored to receive the highly competitive award, for which she was recommended by the College of Education’s research advisory committee. But perhaps just importantly her selection shines a light on the College of Education.
“Education sometimes doesn’t get the attention and respect that it deserves, not only nationally but locally,” Brownell said. “Putting a spotlight on the college could be the nicest part of the award.”
Brownell joined the University of Florida faculty in 1990 and has a lengthy list of accomplishments, including publishing more than 100 scholarly works and securing $42 million in federal grants to fund education research. She directs the college’s CEEDAR Center to improve the preparation of teachers and leaders working with students with disabilities. It was launched with a record $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. CEEDAR is short for Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform.
Source: Mary Brownell, 352-273-4261
Writer: Charles Boisseau, 352-273-4449
