Over the past months, in communities across Florida, United Way of Florida (UWOF) held a) A Listening Tour -50, plus community forums, b) Power Lunch Series with an eclectic mix of stakeholder which then trancended into c) a Virtual Statewide Summit. 

• #1 Participant Request -More Public Forums
• #2 Request - Forums Be Accessible to All Floridians...

Sitting down with people from varied neighborhoods, backgrounds, and roles allowed powerful breakout thinking of one-to-one connections in civil conversation on how we as teachers, students, parents and communities can and must engage in student success -together.  Our team traveled the state to ensure that access to these forums would be an options to people across the state. Yet for our state summit, it wasn't an option to remove barriers for folks from all points in the state to physically attend -so we walked our talk. After hearing loud and clear travel/access was an issue, we completely changed from our scheduled face-to-face summit into a virtual gathering. 

Citizen ideas and discussions are included in the post-summit report. Here's a sneak peek at the final illustration of that discussion. In the report you'll find versions as it developed, plus a larger detailed view. Click here to view the report in full: United Way of Florida Virtual Summit Real-Time Record . There are so many components and issues that need to be addressed as a community and each topic could easily take a week to fully cover. Yet we need to discuss overarching concepts with neighbors and community members who we don't typically talk with to define bring diverse understandings closer together.  We knew we could only cover so much ground, therefore, participants collaboratively worked in breakouts with a facilitator sharing thoughts and ideas to empower effective teachers with community support in three group areas:

Great public comments and insight.

1. Preparation and Development
2. Recruitment and Retention
3. Evaluation and Placement

Participants were automatically escorted into small online groups to discuss specific questions where they chose their best bold ideas to share with the group. Then everyone came back to the "Florida Room" for a group discussion. At that point, a collective vote on all the ideas that came from each of the small breakout discussions was taken which allowed the top 3 or 4 bold ideas to rise to the top.  Those ideas helped to craft an overall illustration of community insight.

For the majority of participants this was their first virtual interactive summit experience. Here are a few immediate responses... "I loved the interactive collaborative experience!"  "This was great! Nothing like a webinar I expected." "The Power Lunches were good, I never thought online collaboration would be better."

Why Empowering Effective Teachers?  

Teacher effectiveness is the primary in-school influence on student performance and is a key determinant of whether children, regardless of background, succeed in school.  Annually, students with the most-effective teachers learn up to an entire grade level more than students with the least-effective teachers.

Thank you to those who joined in this conversation.  For those unable to participate, please join us in future events as we engage our global community of educators, community and faith-based, business, government, and policy leaders in championing a charge for progress -collectively.

More Information Links.

 Visit the Empowering Effective Teachers Online Wiki Community or access us at www.uwof.org.

Contacts.

Victoria Zepp, Zepp Strategic Partners - United Way of Florida Consultants 

Ted Granger, President - United Way of Florida
850.386.8151   |   eet@uwof.org    |   www.uwof.org