UF’s College of Education is partnering with a tech company to teach Colorado teachers how to, well, teach better.
The college’s Lastinger Center for Learning will partner with the company Promethean World Ltd. to improve how educators teach at under-achieving schools. Colorado educators will begin learning from the program this Summer.
UF and Promethean will be among six other providers running the program, said Philip Poekert, the center’s assistant director and Colorado project manager.
“Working in Colorado is within a general realm of the work that we do,” Poekert said.
The UF center and Promethean will train facilitators who will then demonstrate what they’ve learned to teachers, coaches, school administrators, district administrators and charter school management staff in Colorado, Poekert said.
Participants will attend a four-day session in the summer and five sessions throughout the school year to receive feedback, Poekert said.
The Colorado Department of Education started the program to help underachieving schools.
Colorado will give the schools grants, which will be used to pay the providers, including UF.
Mark Quintana, the Promethean senior education consultant and Colorado project adviser, said one of the program’s focuses is to show teachers how to be experts on how individual children learn.
Identifying the learning style of each child is a common need in low-performing schools, Quintana said.
“And it’s not necessarily cookie-cutter, or the same, for every individual child,” Quintana said.
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