When Jocelyn Nerey enrolled at UF in 2008, she didn’t pack up a U-Haul, slap a SunPass on her windshield and hit the northbound lanes on the turnpike. Instead, she continued working as a prekindergarten special education teacher at Coral Park Elementary School in Miami.
As a graduate student in the UF Lastinger Center for Learning’s Florida Master Teacher Initiative, Nerey, 34, takes online courses and meets in her classroom with one or more of the program’s three Miami-based professors-in-residence.
UF offers the tuition-free, on-the-job graduate degree program for teachers in high-need schools in five counties: Alachua, Collier, Duval, Pinellas and Miami-Dade, where it started in 2006.
It’s now in 25 Miami-Dade schools, with 88 teachers in pursuit of their master’s or, as in Nerey’s case, specialist’s degrees.
The Lastinger Center is preparing to expand and evaluate the program in 25 more Miami-Dade schools through a $6 million Investing in Innovation grant it recently received from the U.S. Department of Education (including a $1 million match from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation).
The Lastinger Center was one of only 49 programs to earn the grant. Other winners include the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Science Resources Center and Teach for America.
The grant-funded Lastinger expansion will benefit about 1,125 teachers and nearly 30,000 students in Miami-Dade.
“This is an exciting chance for us to create and research new ways of approaching teacher development, early childhood education, student assessment and a variety of other priorities,” said Phil Poekert, a UF Lastinger Center professor-in-residence in Miami.
California-based research institute SRI International will receive $950,000 of the grant money to observe and evaluate the program’s impact on the grant’s 25 participating schools, compared to a control group of 25 randomly selected schools in Miami-Dade.
“This will be our opportunity to prove whether our project works,” Poekert said. “We would like to say with certainty, using the gold standard of research, that this has a positive effect on teachers and their practice, the school culture and the student learning.”
At Coral Park Elementary, teachers join forces to tackle individual and common issues.
“The program has taught us to build a community within our school,” Nerey said. “When I sat down with my colleagues, I realized that we all had the same problems and we could work together to attack them.”
In her portable classroom in the back of the school, Nerey works year-round to develop a maternal relationship with her 12 prekindergarten special education students.
Many of her students struggle to say their own names, use the bathroom by themselves or walk, but Nerey aims to help them become as independent as possible.
“I build on being positive, loving and kind, and I feel that will bring out the stuff that they need to learn,” she said. “From a simple thing like potty training to learning how to read, I have to find what motivates them.”
It is Nerey’s dedication to helping her students that led her to enroll in the Master Teacher program.
Magdalena “Magdi” Castañeda, a UF professor-in-residence in Miami, has worked with Nerey since she started the program and has witnessed her improvement as a teacher.
“[Nerey] was an exceptional childhood educator with a strong foundation in child development to begin with,” Castañeda said. “But now she’s learning even more because she seeks the knowledge and she thrives on it.”
Nerey hopes to one day become a leader in her school, but she has no intention to leave the classroom or her students anytime soon.
“I don’t bring these kids down because they have a disability,” she said. “On the contrary, I have to be stronger with them because I know they can do it.”
