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UF Lastinger Center describes statewide literacy, tutoring and educator professional-learning programs
Summary
The University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning updated the Senate committee on statewide literacy initiatives, the New World’s Reading Initiative, microcredentials, the Florida Tutoring Advantage pilot, and data-driven learning tools used to scale teacher supports.
The University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning briefed the Senate Committee on Education Postsecondary about statewide literacy initiatives, teacher professional learning and plans to expand tutoring supports.
“Today, I wanna just introduce the center to you,” Dr. Phil Pokert, director and clinical professor at the Lastinger Center, said at the hearing. He described the center’s mission as improving teaching, learning and child care through research, development and scaling of educational innovations.
The center described two main program areas: professional learning focused on early milestones (kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading and algebra) and statewide literacy and tutoring programs. The Lastinger Center administers the New World’s Reading Initiative—established by statute and run in partnership with Scholastic—and provides books and family resources in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole and Braille. The presenter said the New World’s program has reached nearly 400,000 enrolled children of about 1,000,000 eligible students and that the program had shipped more than 8,000,000 books to date.
The center also described literacy professional learning and microcredentials rooted in the science of reading. Dr. Pokert said the reading endorsement pathway and microcredentials have served tens of thousands of educators: “to date, we have served over 41,000 educators in Florida's early learning system” and nearly 27,000 educators have taken literacy microcredentials since launch. He said about 37,100 teachers have earned the reading endorsement pathway to date, and that reading-initiative participants have shown faster gains on FAST assessments, with English language learners showing particularly pronounced growth.
On tutoring, the Lastinger Center said it is standing up the Florida Tutoring Advantage (created by statute in the prior session) to make tutoring available across reading and math in multiple modalities—software, virtual and in-person—and plans to pilot program components and a 10-week tutoring window aligned to research on dosage and frequency.
The presenter described data and AI initiatives, noting the center’s aggregated databases include over 100,000 educator accounts, about a terabyte of data and roughly 2,000,000,000 records from multiple sources; the center is using AI tools to deliver personalized feedback on lesson plans and to develop tutoring agents for middle-school math.
Dr. Pokert asked committee members to note the center’s legislative role—he said the center was named in statute by HB 1361 and serves as a state partner for reading and tutoring initiatives—and said UF is piloting interactive reading tools (a “reading wand” distributed to 50,000 families) and partnering with Highlights Magazine for summer materials distribution.
Committee members praised the center’s work but did not take formal action on the presentation.
