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.
GAINESVILLE, FLA. — The Jim Moran Foundation has awarded a $1 million grant to the University of Florida College of Education to provide access to the latest teaching tools for the state’s 55,000 early learning educators.
Early Learning Florida dovetails with one of UF’s priority research initiatives to “optimize” early childhood learning and healthy child development. Pictured: a teacher engages a toddler at UF’s Baby Gator Child Development and Research Center. (File photo)
The funding will boost the college’s transformational Early Learning Florida program, a first-of-its-kind online professional development system for early learning practitioners.
“We’re thrilled and grateful,” said Don Pemberton, director of the UF Lastinger Center for Learning, the college’s innovation incubator that is implementing the program. “We’ll use this money to improve learning and development for hundreds of thousands of young children by providing new tools and resources to build the skills of early learning professionals.”
Built through community support, Early Learning Florida offers online and face-to-face instruction and continuing education with the latest course content, plus new certification programs for technical assistance coaches. State-funded stipends for early learning providers who successfully complete the course also are made available.
“By partnering with the Lastinger Center on this innovative initiative, we are helping create a standard for early learning that equips classroom teachers with the knowledge and know-how to provide all our children with a solid foundation for future academic success,” said Jan Moran, chairman and president of The Jim Moran Foundation, based in Deerfield Beach, Fla.
Early Learning Florida dovetails with one of UF’s priority research initiatives to “optimize” early childhood learning and development. Early childhood studies are a vital component of UF’s preeminence push — backed by the Florida Legislature — to become one of the nation’s top 10 public research universities.
Don Pemberton
Pemberton said The Jim Moran Foundation grant – which will be dispersed in equal payments over the next three years – also serves as an endorsement of the foundation’s belief in the importance of early learning.
“We are humbled to receive such a generous investment in our work from a foundation that honors the memory and extends the legacy of one of Florida’s greatest entrepreneurs and humanitarians,” he said.
The Jim Moran Foundation is one of four major philanthropic organizations that, together, have donated more than $3 million over multiple years to support Early Learning Florida.
The other three contributors are the Helios Education Foundation ($900,000), which supports education reform in Florida and Arizona; the Florida-based Lastinger Family Foundation ($500,000); and $600,000 from an Ohio-based foundation that has asked to remain anonymous.
About The Jim Moran Foundation
Founded by automotive pioneer Jim Moran, the mission of The Jim Moran Foundation is to improve the quality of life for the youth and families of Florida through the support of innovative programs and opportunities that meet the ever-changing needs of the community. The Foundation has invested more than $50 million in education, elder care, family strengthening, and youth transitional living initiatives since its inception in 2000 — with efforts currently focused in Broward, Palm Beach and Duval counties. Through a long-term grant agreement, The Foundation’s significant funders are JM Family Enterprises, Inc., and its subsidiaries, including Southeast Toyota Distributors, LLC. It is located at 100 Jim Moran Blvd., Deerfield Beach, Fla. 33442. To learn more, visit www.jimmoranfoundation.org or call (954) 429-2122.
About the UF Lastinger Center for Learning
Part of the University of Florida, the Lastinger Center is the College of Education’s educational innovation incubator. It harnesses the university’s intellectual resources to design, build, field-test and scale models that advance teaching, learning and healthy child development. The center continuously evaluates and refines its work, widely disseminates its findings and roots its initiatives in a growing network of partner sites around the state and country.
UF Source: Don Pemberton, director, UF Lastinger Center for Learning; 352-273-4103; dpemberton@coe.ufl.edu
UF Media Contact: Larry Lansford, director, UF College of Education; 352-273-4137; llansford@coe.ufl.edu
Writer: Stephen Kindland, staff writer, UF College of Education; skindland@coe.ufl.edu
GAINESVILLE, Fla.—UF-Teach, an innovative teacher-preparation program that recruits some of the University of Florida’s top science and mathematics majors into the teaching profession, recently received STEMflorida’s Best Practices Award for excellence and accountability in targeted STEM teacher recruitment and retention efforts.
STEMflorida is a business-led statewide council created in 2009 by Workforce Florida, the state’s workforce policy and oversight board. (STEM is common shorthand for the technical disciplines of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, considered vital workforce skills in today’s competitive global marketplace.)
The award was presented recently during the STEMflorida Think Tank meeting in Orlando and recognized the UF Teach program’s role in addressing the critical shortage of math and science teachers in Florida.
UF-Teach master science instructor Griff Jones (left) helps a student on a class lesson.
UF-Teach is a collaboration between UF’s College of Education and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the goal is to recruit the very best math and science majors and prepare them to teach effectively. The program is funded by a $2.4 million grant over five years from the National Math and Science Initiative and a $1 million endowment from the Helios Education Foundation based in Tampa.
“In UF-Teach, we have master science and math teachers who induct the students into the community of teachers by showing them the most effective, research-proven teaching methods in the given content areas and exposing them to supervised classroom experiences with schoolchildren beginning in their first semester,” said Tom Dana, associate dean at UF’s College of Education and co-coordinator of UF Teach with physics professor and associate dean Alan Dorsey of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The program, now in its fourth year, offers students education minors for their efforts in hopes they will take to teaching. Their degrees qualify them for teaching certification in Florida schools.
Dana
The first UF-Teach class of 41 students enrolled in 2008. By spring of 2011, enrollment jumped to 224 students. Dana said projections for 2013 call for UF-Teach to graduate more than 30 students who will be certified, and highly qualified, to teach middle and high school math and science in Florida schools.
“That number should double to 60 graduates by 2015. By then, the number of middle school and high school math and science students served by UF-Teach graduates should top 7,500 and continue to grow each year,” Dana said.
For more information, contact Dana at tdana@coe.ufl.edu or Dorsey at atdorsey@ufl.edu, or visit the UF Teach website at https://education.ufl.edu/uf-teach/.
CONTACTS
SOURCE: Tom Dana, UFCOE associate dean and co-coordinator, UF Teach, tdana@coe.ufl.edu.
WRITER: Larry Lansford, director, COE News & Communications, llansford@coe.ufl.edu; 352-273-4137
