Funded Research and Development

Early Learning Performance Funding Project (2014-2019)

The Florida Office of Early Learning contacted the Lastinger Center to evaluate a five-year pilot project designed to determine how specific teacher professional learning approaches impact children who attend school readiness programs.

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A Comprehensive Evaluation of Florida’s Early Childhood Professional Development System

In 2011, Florida’s Office of Early Learning (now Division of Early Learning) commissioned the Lastinger Center to listen to the voices of stakeholders in the state’s early childhood professional development system and complete an analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. The Office of Early Learning sought to identify actionable steps to improve the quality, availability, affordability, and accessibility of professional development.

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Creating a Formula for Success: Recommendations from an Evaluation of Florida’s Mathematics Professional Development Landscape

In 2021, a team from the Lastinger Center surveyed and interviewed secondary math educators from across Florida to better understand the current state of available professional learning opportunities available. Several themes emerged: educators experience varying levels of access to ongoing, frequent professional development opportunities that are considered high quality and desire more collaborative opportunities to engage with peers and coaches.

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COVID-19 Virtual Listening Tour

In May 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the Lastinger Center to conduct a virtual listening tour to understand how coronavirus impacted various aspects of education. Our research team interviewed more than 4,600 students, parents, teachers, early childhood and K-12 educators and administrators across Florida. Through this process, we identified key themes and innovations that emerged from the pandemic.

School districts and early learning coalitions found creative ways to assist students during the closures. From urban to rural areas, there was no end to the resilience of teachers and caregivers.

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Lastinger 2018 Listening Tour Report

Innovation demands maintaining a deep understanding of our context—plus our stakeholders’ realities, challenges and needs. In 2018, Director Phil Poekert and leadership embarked on a 6-week Listening Tour of the birth through 12th grade education systems across Florida. The tour spanned nearly 3,000 miles and 20 Florida counties. It included more than 100 educational stakeholders ranging from preschoolers to high schoolers, from teachers to district administrators, from parents to agency and organization leaders to elected officials, and from rural areas to urban centers. We use the data gathered to inform broader efforts for educational advancement in Florida and beyond.

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DIsability Anti-buLlying Training (DIAL)

Students with or at-risk for disabilities are disproportionately affected by bullying in school. Through a partnership with Dorothy Espelage, Ph.D., at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Chad Rose, Ph.D., at the University of Missouri, our team developed a unique professional development program targeting K-5 educators’ roles in bullying prevention as a way to support increased academic achievement. With funding from an Institute of Education Sciences Goal 2 award, we built a professional development intervention that aims to close the research-to-practice gap by educating teachers regarding the requisite background knowledge and concrete behavior management strategies that are evidence-based and actionable. With this training, teachers will be empowered to foster improved learning environments that promote healthy social skills, attitudes and behaviors that support learning and result in increased academic achievement for all students.  This training guides school-based staff to integrate effective anti-bullying strategies in the school’s unique multi-tier system of supports (MTSS) for sustained change.

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Understanding Trauma and Social-Emotional Learning in Schools

School resource officers and other school security professionals (SSPs) have become increasingly common in schools. However, most states do not require that these professionals receive training related to understanding trauma and how it may affect students’ behavior and how to promote social–emotional learning competencies among students. This project evaluated an online professional development program for SSPs that provides education on two topics related to best practices in working with youth in K-12 school settings: trauma-informed care (TIC) and social–emotional learning.

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Trauma Informed Care in Schools: Perspectives from School Resource Officers

School resource officers (SROs) and school security professionals (SSPs) have increased presence in schools, yet little is known about how they view the importance of their relationships with students and the broader school climate. Informed by the levels of ecological systems theory, three salient themes were identified by the researchers: how SSPs and SROs describe school climate, how they respond to students with traumatic experiences and how their perspectives may be affected by their differing roles. Findings indicate that SROs and SSPs benefited from our training on trauma-informed care because they expressed learning new strategies and feeling better equipped to serve and support students with known or unknown adverse childhood experiences.

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Gates Foundation Flamingo Nation Data Lagoon

Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we are initially integrating data from the Math Nation online platform and Flamingo Learning online professional development platform, where our flagship programs like Literacy Matrix and Math Matrix systems are housed, to form the Flamingo Nation Data Lagoon. The increased power of having all data together unlocks the innate dependency of reading/literacy and math achievement. With this longitudinal data, we will be able to explore learning patterns that contribute to successful, timely achievement of major learning milestones and identify strategies to bolster achievement for others throughout their educational careers.

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Practice-Driven Professional Development for Algebra Teachers

This National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project led by Zandra de Araujo, Ph.D., seeks to develop a personalized, scalable professional development (PD) approach that centers on and builds from algebra teachers’ practices and individual strengths. The project will focus its PD efforts on instructional actions that are tailored to teachers’ existing practice, can be readily adopted, and are easily accessible, which the team has termed as high-uptake practices. The project will develop and field test PD materials to support algebra teachers at scale via these high-uptake practices.  Follow project updates on their website.

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