What is a Listening Tour?

Phil Poekert: So the Listening Tours got started under our founding director, Don Pemberton back in 2002. As the center was just getting started, we had a broad mission to help teachers teach and to help students learn.

But Don defined what that meant by conversations he had with teachers across the state of Florida when he went out and asked them, what do you need? What could we be doing better? What’s working well and where can we improve?

The goal has always been to be a responsive innovation center. And the only way you can be responsive is if you know the conditions and circumstances on the ground. Rather than innovate from the ivory tower, the point is to go out and talk directly to the stakeholders that are in classrooms, on the front lines, who are working with students every day.

All of them have unique perspectives on what the education system is doing and how well it’s doing. And each of them can provide important information to inform how we can innovate together to better meet the challenges of today. And this year, we’re going out to talk to people about the information systems that support Florida educators and families so that they can make good decisions about what’s best for their students.

Every few years, we’ve had the practice of getting on the road, and we go from Pensacola down to the Keys and all points in between. And in each region, we take care to visit schools, to talk to school leaders, to talk to system administrators, business leaders and policy makers to understand the unique needs, to talk to parents and coaches and caregivers about what their students and children need in that community.

And we gather all of that by meeting face-to-face and shaking hands and sitting and listening to what’s going on in their lives to understand what their experiences are, what their needs are. And we come back to the community through the member checking sessions that we do in the spring, in which we bring that information back to folks and say, did we get it right? Did we miss anything? And if these are the findings that we should advance, what do we do about them together collectively as a state?

And so that’s something that’s been a proud tradition at the Lastinger Center that I’m really happy to be able to continue to carry on and to engage our team in and to engage partner organizations who want to have those insights as well so we can work collectively to make Florida’s education system even better moving forward.