FIE projects address critical educational issues in Florida. Working with local, regional, and statewide initiatives, these projects cover a wide range of topics:
FIE Partnerships
FIE understands that success does not happen in a vacuum. In fulfilling its mission to provide statewide leadership for improving education at all levels, FIE continues to grow its individual and organizational partnerships throughout Florida.
School Readiness
FIE continues to build on a rich body of research to support young children’s learning and the active engagement in that learning by their families. FIE researchers worked collaboratively with school readiness and prekindergarten teachers to develop and test innovative instructional strategies using concept mapping designed to strengthen children’s background knowledge, vocabulary, and connection-making skills. This past year was a busy one in the school readiness sector.
Family Child Care Homes Instructional Units
The Family Home Instructional Units are designed for Family Home providers and teachers who work with 2-,3-, and 4 year old children. The Family Home Instructional Units are supplemental curriculum that support recent emergent literacy research that strengthens children's knowledge.
FIE/DCPS Title 1 Success By Design: PreK - 3 Initiative
The Success by Design: PreK-Grade 3 initiative, a collaboration between Duval County Public Schools Academic Services and FIE, provided research-informed professional learning opportunities for participating prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers.
K-12 Education
FIE continued its partnership with the Florida Department of Education and all 67 school districts through the Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools Technical Assistance Project. The project works to collect data, inform policy, and educate the community and K-12 public schools about the harmful effects of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and bullying to the health, safety, and education of Florida’s students.
Family Engagement
FIE partners with Duval County Public Schools and its Title I program in the PreK–3: Success by Design initiative to develop a well-coordinated early learning and transition system to improve PreK-Grade 3 children’s achievement, promote meaningful family engagement, and provide professional learning opportunities for Prekindergarten-Grade 3 practioners.
Research and Evaluation
FIE works toward this vision using a systematic approach for improving practice and informing policy, an approach which embraces a sustained commitment to research, to university/practitioner collaboration, to innovation and development, to dissemination of evidence-based tools and strategies, and to data-informed decision- and policy-making.
Strategic Coaching
The Florida Institute of Education created and implemented the FIE Strategic Coaching Model to help build capacity of teachers and address the school readiness gap between children living in poverty and their more affluent peers. Initially, the model focused on improving teacher skills in the areas of reading aloud, oral language, letter/sound knowledge, phonological awareness, and emergent writing.
FIE Doctoral Student Research Assistants
FIE provides COEHS doctoral students interested in improving educational outcomes for at-risk children and youth opportunities to work with researchers in ongoing research studies and curriculum research and development efforts taking place at FIE.
Concept Mapping
Concept maps are two-dimensional, hierarchical diagrams depicting relationships among concepts. Their use helps individuals visualize the structure of the mapped knowledge. The construction of concept maps helps transform non-spatial information into connected webs and, as a result, supports the development of spatial thinking both on the part of the mapper as well as those reading the maps. Concept mapping was used to organize the FIE Annual Report and is used to present the Table of Contents.
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