In this district—the nation's second largest—nearly three-fourths of the students qualify for reduced-price meals, and nearly one-third are English language learners. Most of the targeted schools are not meeting adequate yearly progress goals, and none are meeting state performance goals in U.S. history. In addition, budget issues have limited the amount of professional development available for U.S. history teachers in underperforming schools. During the project, teachers will attend (1) nine day-long in-service workshops, featuring content lectures and training in differentiated instruction, student evaluation and the project's core content-related teaching practices; (2) two after-school meetings per month to prepare pretests and posttests for students and examine content and relevant materials; and (3) a 5-day summer institute to study content, review standards, and develop lesson plans and classroom-ready resources and materials. The project staff will visit each teacher’s class four times per year to observe, model lessons, share new materials and provide support. The project will provide more than 250 hours of instruction to nine cohorts of 35 teachers —three fifth grade cohorts (Years 1 and 2), three eighth grade cohorts (Years 2 and 3) and three eleventh grade cohorts (Years 4 and 5). Over their two years of professional development, the project teachers will read at least 10 books and numerous articles as well as learn to use primary documents, artifacts, first-hand accounts, illustrations and site visits to translate content into classroom lessons. Best practices, lessons and materials will be posted online via three separate Web sites.

This large and diverse California district has a majority of students (70%) eligible for reduced-price meals, and many middle and high school history teachers work outside of their major fields. Each year, the project will offer six after-school seminars and a summer seminar, in addition to lesson study groups. An online professional development component—PD OnDemand—will begin during Year 2; learning sessions recorded during Year 1 will be available, as will teacher-created lessons from Year 1. Two tiers of professional development will be offered: Tier 1 will engage 75 teachers in a 3-year, 200-hour commitment; and Tier 2 will offer online access to events, guest speakers and products to all district history teachers. When the initial Tier 1 group concludes, recently hired teachers will be recruited for Years 4 and 5; some teachers who participated at the Tier 2 level earlier may also join this cadre. C.O.R.E. stands for content, organizations, reflective practice and experiences—the conceptual framework for this project. History content will be aligned with school level, so middle and high school teachers will study topics appropriate to their teaching assignments. Historian-led seminars will focus on key issues and events in American history, as well as ways to deliver instruction that supports higher level student thinking. Ongoing lesson study groups will be led by a specialist and will engage teachers in creating, teaching, observing, reflecting and refining as they develop classroom lessons. These lessons will become part of the PD OnDemand Web site, making classroom-validated resources widely available.

These southern California districts include low-performing schools with diverse student populations. History teachers in the district have expressed an interest in making constitutional heritage and democratic values more meaningful to students. Each year of the project, teachers will participate in seven days of professional development—including direct interaction with scholars who specialize in topics related to traditional constitutional and presidential history—and at least 16 additional hours of professional development to increase their content knowledge and capacity to provide effective instruction. The annual activities will include a 4-day content institute at a historical archive followed by four meetings using the Scholar Sessions model, which features a lecture/question-and-answer session, an academic reading and discussion session with a scholar, and a content application activity requiring the teachers to demonstrate their subject knowledge. Eighth-grade teachers will participate for all five years, while others will attend institutes specific to the subjects they teach. The project will explore four constitutional themes: governance, freedom of religion and expression, due process, and equality. Central themes will focus on the principles of freedom and democracy articulated in the founding documents and historic cases and controversies of the U.S. Supreme Court. Strategies will include building infrastructure through collaborative groups to make U.S. history a high priority in the districts; creating an open education resource Web site; and providing an experimental evaluation to gauge the project's impact on teacher content knowledge, historical thinking skills and capacity to provide effective instruction. Participants will make presentations about the project at national and local forums and submit journal articles for publication.

Very few teachers in the Burbank and Glendale, California, districts have history degrees, and history professional development has been hard to get. Also, 64 different languages are spoken in these schools, adding another challenge for teachers whose students have little understanding of the nation’s history. Annual activities will include five after-school workshops, a summer institute or workshop, a spring break or summer field trip, 10 hours of one-on-one lesson development and coaching support, and visits to local museum and archive resources.

Cohorts of 25 teachers will participate each year, based on content appropriate to their grade level, with an additional 20 teachers per year having access to workshops and summer institutes. The participants will explore historical turning points, key individuals and founding documents through four interconnected themes: the setting, the stories of the people, the government policies and Western influence on the nation as a whole. Teachers will learn research techniques, use of primary source documents, lesson development and evaluation. Their visits to local and distant sites will help teachers better understand the content they teach. Participants will develop rigorous, standards-based lesson plans to be disseminated through presentations at professional conferences and at special professional development events sponsored by the project. In addition, the project Web site will house model lesson plans, recorded lectures and presentations, and other resources for content and pedagogy.

Although the county's 18 districts vary in many ways, all have marked socioeconomic, ethnic and linguistic diversity, and some have large achievement gaps. This project builds on two previous Teaching American History projects to expand the community of highly qualified history teachers in the Berkeley, Calif., area. In addition to scholars, historians and instructional specialists, 10 teachers from a previous project will become mentor-leaders and will help to lead events that will include quarterly release day sessions, after-school workshops, weeklong summer institutes, online discussions and lesson study groups. The cadre of 30 teachers will be selected first from the three partnering districts; if slots remain available, teachers from other districts will be welcome to apply for the 3-year program. An additional 60 teachers will be recruited to participate in a "Meet the Scholars" lecture series. The theme of this project is "Re-Seeing American History: Freedom, Equality and Democracy Reconsidered." Project content will focus on interconnections between national rebuilding and social justice movements. Lesson study will be the mainstay of the instructional approach; as teachers are exposed to advanced scholarship around political, economic and sociocultural developments in the nation’s history, they will create, implement and analyze lessons centered on primary sources. This work will be supported by online discussions in a private area of the project Web site; the public area of the site will provide open access to lesson plans, videos and other products. Participants will also be involved in preparing proposals for conference presentations and articles for professional publications.

This Arizona district is extremely diverse, and the large majority of students are first- or second-generation Americans. During the first three years of the project, 30 teachers will attend quarterly reading and conference sessions at Phoenix-area museums, six Professional Learning Community meetings and three summer study trips, including visits to historic sites in Arizona, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York City. They also will attend the National Council for Social Studies Annual Conference. In the final two years, the same 30 teachers will study biographies and primary sources. Teachers will be selected based on their willingness to change the way they teach U.S. history, their existing historical knowledge and their commitment to full participation. Each of the largest high schools will be represented by at least one teacher, who will become a peer coach and trainer for others at the school. The project will emphasize parallel and divergent developments in American and Arizona history, highlighting areas where historians disagree. The teachers and their students also will take part in the Arizona Centennial celebration. The teachers will learn to use primary sources, including texts, art, artifacts and multimedia resources. In addition, they will learn strategies for planning classroom activities and delivering rich content; assigning and scoring student reading and writing projects that align with state and national core standards; and introducing content and materials that integrate the colonial and territorial history of the Southwest, especially Arizona, with the typical scope and sequence of U.S. history courses. A project Web site will house lessons and resources developed by the teachers.

This northern Arizona consortium is located in a geographically isolated area. Half the students are minorities—mostly Native Americans—and 44 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The project will offer three-credit elective graduate-level courses that include content seminars, hands-on workshops, field study research, grade-based professional learning communities, lesson study sessions, online discussions and one-on-one mentoring. The courses will be taught at Northern Arizona University over six days during the school year and three days in the summer. The courses will explore pivotal events, people, legislation and judicial cases; the concepts of local, state and national significance; and the intersection of native and national storylines. Teachers may pursue two paths. An intensive 2-year track will help teachers partially complete their master’s degrees in history; in addition to the regular content, these courses will feature 3-day field study trips, online discussions and small group studies. This master's track will involve two cohorts of 15 teachers: Cohort A from summer 2011 to spring 2013, and Cohort B from summer 2013 to spring 2015. Cohort A teachers will be encouraged to continue participating after spring 2013 and serve as teacher leaders with the project and in their schools and districts. In addition, two biannual cohorts of 15 teachers will pursue a less-intensive professional recertification track. The project's key strategies are the "learn, do, teach" and "local-to-global" approaches that focus on primary sources, historical scholarship, local significance and engaging instructional strategies. Teacher-created lesson plans, activities, annotated primary sources and book critiques will be posted on a Moodle site.

The project will serve public schools on the five islands of American Samoa, where all students qualify for free school lunches. A needs survey demonstrated that 96 percent of history teachers had not majored in history and that student achievement in history needs to improve—58 percent of fourth graders, 36 percent of eighth graders and 38 percent of twelfth graders scored below average on the history cluster of the 2009 SAT-10. Through this project, two cohorts of 25 teachers will participate in 480 hours of American history instruction and professional development regarding classroom-ready teaching techniques. This training will include (1) 10 day-long symposia on American history content, six core content-related teaching practices and response-to-intervention implementation; (2) a 3-day summer institute and field study focused on topics that align with grade-level curriculum content, including training in teaching strategies, standards review and lesson development from the field study; and (3) teacher networking through after-school meetings held twice monthly to review student performance and develop intervention strategies. Cohort 1 (Grades 5-8) will receive training in the first 3 years, with Cohort 2 (Grades 9-12) following in the final two years. After the summer institutes of 2012 (for Cohort 1) and 2015 (for Cohort 2), the project teachers will travel to the mainland to visit historic sites most have only read about. They will learn to use content-related teaching methods, including primary source documents, artifacts, fine art, illustrations and maps to translate newly mastered content into their classes. The project will post online curriculum developed by the project, best practices and other materials.

Defining America is a combined effort of two regional educational service agencies—one in northwestern Wisconsin and the other in northeastern Minnesota. Together, they serve 55 mainly rural districts plus several Native American schools and have a total of 10 schools in need of improvement. Project activities will provide opportunities for history teachers to work directly with master teachers, curriculum experts, and archivists. Face-to-face experiences will include 5-day summer colloquia and one and a half-day retreats and seminars of various lengths. Online activities will include creation of a Moodle site where project staff and participants can share ideas and practices and conduct online discussions. When project staff select the 40 teaching fellows, their priority will be on recruiting teachers from schools in need of improvement. The theme of Defining America is examining critical eras when, at the national level, the meaning of "America" was created or significantly redefined. History content will include the relevant national events and people, and will also make connections to local and Native American history. Teachers will learn to identify historical resources, incorporate historical thinking into teacher-created lesson plans and classroom activities, and use best practices in instruction. When teaching fellows complete their 3-year Defining America experience, they will have a pool of lesson plans to share with other teachers and will be a resource for colleagues in their districts to improve history instruction across all schools.

In the nine southern West Virginia counties that have organized for this project, few history teachers at any level have taken an in-field graduate class. Prism-WV and America's Founders will connect teachers with prominent scholars, university faculty, guest lecturers, mentors and master teachers during 1- or 2-week summer academies, 2-day colloquia during the school year, and occasional visits to schools. In addition, participants will enroll in Concord University's graduate certificate program in American History to take five online courses that address the project's annual topics. In Year 1, 40 teachers will be admitted, and they will be joined by another 50 teachers in Year 2. The 90 teachers will continue as a single cohort for the remainder of the five years, and education students from Concord University will also participate. The professional development will focus on principle (understanding the seminal principles of freedom and democracy); perseverance (studying how the founders implemented these principles); and perspective (enhancing an individual’s world view through knowledge of the nation's history). To incorporate these themes into history instruction, teachers will use primary source materials, learn to think like historians, and engage in conversations about principles as the nation's founders did. Content and instruction will incorporate technologies networked through Concord University's Innovative Technology Application Project, which supports interactive simulation, modeling, animation, and visualization. Prism-WV will produce regional teaching and research partnerships among K-12 teachers of different grade levels, a Teaching Historians Web site, participant-created reports, lesson plans and teaching modules, and a collection of research sites and sources.