The Fort Bend and Spring Branch Independent School Districts serve a diverse population from disadvantaged communities across Houston, Texas, where many students are first-generation Americans. Through the Teachers as Historians program, the two-district consortium will deliver teacher training and support to 14 schools that have not made Adequate Yearly Progress and to 49 additional Title I schools. Annual activities will include a 2-week summer seminar at Rice University, followed by a week-long experiential field study, two workshops and a field study during the school year, three district planning meetings, access to an online community network and digital library, a community lecture by a distinguished historian, and a mentor network facilitated by district curriculum specialists. Each participating teacher will research and create two lessons with the help of a content specialist and a master teacher. Participants who fulfill their grant obligations may apply for a $750 grant, which they can apply toward personal professional development opportunities and classroom resources. A new cohort of 30 teachers will be involved in the program's core activities each year and will be encouraged to continue their participation in the mentor network. The goal of the program is to teach students to think critically about what it means to be an American. Interactive instructional strategies will emphasize critical thinking in response to primary source documents. Lesson plans and resources focused on traditional American history will be presented by teachers at local, state, or national events and will also be uploaded to a digital library and made accessible to history teachers nationwide.

Seven central Texas school districts within the Education Service Center Region 12 service area have formed a consortium to deliver targeted services to nine elementary and secondary schools that have not achieved Adequate Yearly Progress. Through the Lyndon B. Johnson Liberty Fellowship program, consortium teachers of American history in Grades 5, 8, and 11 will be prepared to teach American history as a distinct subject. Annual professional development activities will include a 5-day summer institute, a 2-day fall colloquium, a 3-day winter colloquium, and a 2-day field-study trip. Teachers will also view the American Institute for History Education's monthly Talking History webinars and participate in regular half-day research/lesson development sessions throughout the year. The program will serve 40 fellows, including five seasoned veterans who will serve as teacher-leader content specialists and conduct turnkey sessions for history teachers in all nine schools. A guiding theme woven into fellows' research and instruction will be how geography, economics, and political thought contributed to events in American History. Instructional strategies will incorporate the Understanding by Design approach to constructing lessons, the American Institute for History Education's Twelve Effective Steps to Optimum Teaching, and thereNow's IRIS, which will allow coaches and trusted peers to watch teachers deliver lessons in real time and make constructive comments about the lesson as it happens. Based on their research and training, teachers will create historical narratives, lessons, virtual field tours, and innovative activities to be shared with other history teachers via a Web site.

The Dallas Independent School District serves many students with limited English proficiency, a contributing factor to low history scores. In a recent year, just 54 percent of eighth graders and 68 percent of high school students passed the first-semester exams. Each year History Sparks will begin with a kick-off day during which teachers receive independent study materials, review student work, and participate in sessions delivered by historians and master history educators. Other activities will include Saturday seminars and summer institutes, supplemented by field trips to a local site in Year 3 and a national site in Year 4. A cohort of 50 teachers will be selected from the district's 24 low-performing middle and high schools. Any teachers who leave the program before the final year will be replaced, so the curriculum for each year will be self-contained. History Sparks will help teachers learn to deal with complex questions of historical thinking, form habits of mind for studying historical events, people, and issues, and make connections to contemporary events. Years 1-3 will feature separate strands for middle and high school teachers, each presenting broad, chronological surveys of historical eras. In Years 4 and 5, all teachers will join in deep exploration of selected content. The project will employ primary source documents, books, videos, and Web sites—each accompanied by study questions and bolstered by online discussions that include project leaders and university historians. Participants will leave the professional development with classroom teaching resources and lesson plans that align with state standards and the History Sparks blueprint for effective history teaching and learning.

Teaching American History: Tennessee's First Frontiers being implemented by a consortium of school districts (Carter, Hawkins, Sullivan, and Washington Counties and Elizabethton City Schools) in northeastern Tennessee. It targets low-performing middle and high schools and those with high numbers of students performing below the proficient level on Tennessee achievement tests for American history. Professional development activities will include (1) intensive individual recruitment, counseling, and mentoring by a coach, who will assist teachers in developing their own professional development plans; (2) two 2-day in-service mini-institutes per year, emphasizing history content; (3) eight 2- to 3-hour after-school pedagogy workshops each year; and (4) a 3-day summer public history field experience and three 1-day Saturday sessions that relate local historic sites to major themes in U.S. history. Teachers' professional development plans may include activities such as book studies, development of curriculum and/or document-based assessments, examination of student work, and use of data to inform instruction. The project will serve at least 15 eighth grade and 15 high school teachers per year, and a total of 57 teachers will each participate for at least 90 hours over the life of the grant. Traditional American history content will be viewed through the prism of the changing definition of liberty and freedom. Teachers will be trained to make individual and collective struggles for freedom "come alive" by analyzing primary source documents, placing them in a historical context, and integrating technologies into their teaching practice. A program Web site will feature standards-based materials developed by participating teachers and by local historians and graduate students.

Located in central South Carolina, Sumter County School District Two, Sumter School District 17, and Clarendon County School District Two have not achieved Adequate Yearly Progress for the past two years. U.S. history end-of-course test results show that student performance in history lags far behind performance in math and English language arts in the districts. To develop more knowledgeable history teachers in the districts' elementary, middle, and high schools and to improve student performance, yearly STEP activities for participating teachers will include a 5-day summer institute, a 6-day field study trip, a history educators' forum, and three workshop days featuring local historians. STEP also includes a mentoring component and a technology component. Thirty teachers will be invited to participate in STEP for at least two years and preferably throughout all five years of the project. STEP will provide firsthand encounters with historical places, archives, and ideas to enable teachers to "see, touch, and talk history" and connect local and national history for their students as they explore the role of economics and technological changes and their relationship to society, ideas, and the environment. Instructional strategies will integrate technology and best practices in teaching the content of traditional American history. Teachers will create quality lessons plans and materials that engage students in activities that require higher-level thinking. These lessons will be posted on the districts' Web sites.

Florence School Districts One to Five are located in northeastern South Carolina. All five districts are in restructuring, and 31 percent or more of students in each district scored below basic on the state social studies test in 2007. To help history teachers gain the content knowledge they want, RWS will offer online graduate-level courses on a traditional semester schedule and through intensive study in 2-week summer institutes. Participants will conduct online discussions about history teaching, attend mini-institutes on examining student work and assessment and, in Year 3, become mentors to nonparticipating teachers to help them improve their knowledge and instructional practices. One cohort of 50 teachers drawn from all school levels will complete the 5-year program. Each year, half will take the online course and the other half will participate in the intensive summer institute. RWS aims to develop teacher-historians through increasing participants' knowledge of significant events, principles, historical thinking, and special topics, and by encouraging the practices of collaboration, curriculum design, and reflection. The graduate-level courses will focus on the eras and topics of American history outlined in the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the state's social studies curriculum framework. Other activities will focus on curriculum and instruction designed to build literacy skills and to engage both teachers and students in American history content. The project will result in a collection of teacher-created, technology-driven instructional units to be shared locally and nationally through the RWS Web site, which will also offer teaching resources and links to a variety of primary documents.

Located in South Carolina's Lowcountry, Berkeley, the state's largest school district, includes rural areas, military bases, and the bedroom communities of Charleston. Although the region has a well-developed appreciation for its rich history, the district has never met Adequate Yearly Progress and is in corrective action. Foundations of American History will help history teachers improve their performance through graduate courses, workshops, book studies, and online professional development that emphasize deep content knowledge, strong pedagogical skills, and the use of primary sources and educational technologies. Teachers who participate in required hours during the year can attend the summer institutes, which will include field studies at historical sites. Annual cohorts of 50 elementary teachers will be selected beginning in Year 1. In Year 2, annual cohorts of 10 secondary teachers (participants in a previous Teaching American History project) will join to complete master’s degree requirements and to become mentors and content specialists for the elementary cohorts. The project is designed to establish a strong foundation in elementary school to prepare students for a true understanding of our country's past and its potential for the future. With scholars and specialists, teachers will explore primary sources, the professional learning community, and the creation of a seamless K-5 program of study. Instructional approaches will include balanced literacy for integrating social studies with reading, 6+1 Writing Traits for integrating social studies with writing, and integrating the arts (dance, music, and visual arts) into the social studies. Foundations teachers will contribute to common assessments and benchmarks for elementary-level American history and will become teacher leaders within their schools and the district.

Aiken, Edgefield, and Saluda County Schools in South Carolina included 22 schools in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring at the time of the grant application. To address history teachers' limited access to professional development, Hearing Every Voice will involve teachers in content-rich professional development in American history. Annual activities will include a 3-day fall colloquium, a 2-day summer colloquium, regional historical site visits, a series of 1-day Hometown Heroes workshops that fit local stories into the larger tapestry of American history, and access to quality Web-based content and pedagogical resources via Cicero and Sojourner History. These activities will include intensive content lectures, primary source analysis, innovative pedagogical techniques, training in the use of Historical Habits of the Mind, and hands-on experiences in historical settings. Forty teachers will participate throughout the five years of the project and will be trained as master teachers and mentors for others in their districts. The project’s unifying theme is its focus on helping educators and students understand the interrelated nature and significance of group and individual voices, events, and deeds within the flow of history. Instructional strategies based on Historical Habits of Mind will help teachers and their students develop historical thinking skills and will integrate primary sources and technology. Teachers will create lesson kits that combine scholarly readings, classroom resources, and high-quality lesson plans. These will be made available online.

The Path Through History (Path) districts occupy nearly 18,000 square miles in predominantly rural central Oregon, a region where many schools are isolated from cultural and historical resources and lack access to many professional development opportunities. Path will provide teachers in these districts with face-to-face and online professional development activities—workshops, lectures, field trips, Web courses and more—designed to bring historical resources to even the most remote locations. In some cases, teachers will travel to meeting sites; in others, project staff and teacher-leaders will make school visits for classroom observations and one-on-one coaching sessions. Each year, 30 teachers—preferably in school or grade-level teams—will be recruited from schools with the greatest needs. Five additional teachers who participated in a previous Teaching American History grant will be recruited to act as district teacher-leaders who can develop all teachers' skills and work with administrators to implement structural changes. Pat will apply five historical inquiry themes developed in the previous grant—the American Dream, the Growth of Democracy, Cultural Conflict, Expansion of Borders, and Technology and Change. Each year's content will align with the grade level(s) of the year's participants. Instructional approaches will include constructivist theory, standards-based teaching and learning, formative assessment, differentiated instruction, use of primary and online resources, and employing critical thinking skills. In addition to skilled teachers who can support their colleagues, the project will produce a research study on the project's effects on teacher and student knowledge, a Web site that includes constructivist, rigorous, and standards-based lesson plans, and ongoing Professional Learning Communities.

The mainly rural American History Rocks! Liberty Fellowship (Fellowship) districts in southwestern Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Panhandle have diverse populations that include Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic English Language Learners, and military families. In Grades 5, 8, and 11, more than half of the students are failing American history. Each year, Fellowship teachers will attend colloquia, field trips, research sessions, and summer institutes. Twelve evening videoconferences will also be available to participants and all other district teachers. Participants will comprise a core group of 35 fellows from schools most in need of improvement, plus five content specialists who will receive intensive training so they can begin delivering professional development to nonparticipants in Year 2. This theme of turnkey professional development will extend to all participants by the end of the project, when core group participants will train colleagues at their local schools and districts. Fellowship content will emphasize traditional history teaching by pursuing research, writing historical narratives, creating substantive lessons, and generating Web-based activities that align with state standards. Strategies will include a 12-step process for historical research developed by the American Institute for History Education. online professional development and other resources on CICERO, lesson planning through Understanding by Design, classroom-based coaching, peer review of lessons, and a variety of frameworks for organizing historical content for use with students. The Fellowship project will result in a cadre of 40 teachers who can deliver training to their peers and a published compilation of events, materials, and lessons on a multimedia project Web site.