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.

Teaching American History in North Carolina was designed to align with corrective action plans in the Pender, New Brunswick, and New Hanover School Districts in southeastern North Carolina. The project will target the districts' lowest-performing schools and recruit teachers who have the fewest credentials in history. Five modes of professional development will be offered each year: a lecture series to kick off each year, an intensive series of content seminars hosted at local and regional historical sites and museums, week-long summer institutes that emphasize traditional themes in American history, history-specific pedagogy workshops that convey strategies for scaffolding reading and face-to-face and online participation in professional learning communities. Each year, up to 25 teachers of history in Grades 4-12 will join the project. Incentives will include a stipend that increases when teachers commit to multiple years of participation. Teaching American History in North Carolina will help these teachers tap into the rich history of the state, especially its Cape Fear region, so that they can help students make sense of history by understanding its local manifestations. Master teachers will support the implementation of content literacy strategies as teachers engage students in the process of historical inquiry. The program will result in increased capacity among regional historical institutions to cooperate with local teachers. In addition, curricula, lessons plans, content packets, lecture videos, and other visual media will be made available on a project Web site housed at the History Teaching Alliance at Cape Fear Community College.

Durham and Franklin County Public Schools in North Carolina are teaming to deliver History LINK, a program of professional development that will target high school history teachers in nine schools that did not achieve Adequate Yearly Progress in 2008. Each year, participating teachers will attend 2-week summer institutes (to consist of a weeklong on-site history experience with a partner institution and a weeklong curriculum design seminar) as well as monthly seminars led by historians. Throughout the year, teachers will develop curriculum units and instructional materials that incorporate primary documents and technology. Up to 90 teachers (three cohorts of 30 teachers) will participate. The instructional emphasis will be on document-based questioning, using online primary sources for historical research, and incorporating interactive technology tools. Program leaders will hold follow-up meetings with teachers to support implementation of curriculum units developed during the program. These units may include teacher-developed virtual field trips, digital documentaries, and technology-facilitated interactions between students and historians.

Project HISTORY includes eight districts in central New York, and each district has at least one school in need of improvement or corrective action. Scores on U.S. history and social studies tests have been declining across all school levels, and performance drops on the high-stakes 11th-grade test have been especially worrisome. This project will provide 150 hours of professional development to each participating teacher through seminars, summer and afterschool workshops, museum visits, and five release days during each school year. Two cadres of 30 elementary, middle, and high school teachers will participate for 30 months each and complete the same curriculum. Project HISTORY intends to help teachers master historical thinking skills and transfer those skills to students. To support this effort, seminar content and teacher-created WebQuest lessons will be aligned with state standards. Teachers will engage in technology-supported problem-based learning, historical role play, analysis of original historical documents, including works of art contemporary to important events, and exploration of local historical sites and resources. By the end of the project, teachers will have created a collection of technology-based lessons and planned actual and virtual field trips for students.

Community School District 31 has joined with four other New York City school districts in Brooklyn and Staten Island with a significant immigrant population to implement History for All. Thirty-five percent of the districts' schools have been cited for intervention due to substandard academic achievement, and pass rates on U.S. history exams is particularly low for special education students (27 percent, compared to 63 percent for general education students). Teachers who teach special education students in self-contained and/or inclusive settings will receive 68 hours of professional development annually: four day-long seminars; a week-long summer institute, led by historians, during which teachers will develop classroom activities; and seven monthly after-school meetings during which participants can share experiences and pedagogical approaches and learn to integrate technology, assessment, and fiction and nonfiction. Classroom coaching from the project director will help teachers refine project-based activities. The program will recruit 50 teachers for Years 1-3 and 40 for Years 4-5. All will be trained to lead professional development for other teachers in their schools and districts, and 10 members of the first cohort will join the second cohort and act as lead teachers to support their turnkey training efforts. Historical content will emphasize how Americans of different eras have struggled with and shaped the meaning of democracy in the United States. Teachers will learn to integrate art and material culture into their teaching of history through the use of differentiated instruction and universal design. All participating teachers will become part of a professional development cadre and will distribute classroom-tested activities online.

Woodbury City Public Schools is an urban district in southern New Jersey near the site of the Battle of Red Bank during the Revolutionary War. About half of the students are from minority backgrounds, and the number of Latino students is growing. The district's history teachers have had few opportunities for professional development. History specialists will lead eight days of training a year, including two 2-day colloquia, two half days of research and review, and a 3-day summer institute. The project will also present 12 evening videoconferences that will be open to all district teachers. Each year, 40 teacher fellows will participate in activities designed in a turnkey train-the-trainer approach. The Battle of Red Bank project aims to help teachers, and thereby students, examine history through the lens of a historian. Teachers will study substantive content through researching political, economic, legal, and social events and issues in American history. They will look at contemporary and later historiographies, along with primary documents. Instructional strategies will include Binary Paideia and Understanding by Design. These strategies will be incorporated into teacher-designed lessons, which will also employ the American Institute for History Education's Talking History network, 12-step process for student research, and frameworks and strategies. Classroom observations and coaching will help teachers refine their lessons so they can be used by other teachers. Online resources provided through CICERO, a Web-based history resource, will be available to fellows and all district teachers. The project will develop a cadre of trainers to deliver turnkey replication of project activities, and a collection of lesson units that use innovative classroom strategies.

This northern New Jersey consortium has more than 157 schools in need of improvement. More than 28 percent of students are classified as disabled and many teachers are not highly qualified to teach American history. Coaching staff—historians and educators—will deliver 111 hours of training, plus eight hours aimed at helping nonparticipants implement curriculum created by participants. The project will offer three distinct 2-year programs, each designed to serve specific grade levels. Each year, each district will have five 2-hour afterschool workshops, one full-day training, a 35-hour summer institute, a regional event/conference to promote replication, on-site and online mentoring, and access to a Web site containing resources and other project products. Years 1 and 2 will involve 60 high school teachers; Years 2 and 3 will train 60 middle school teachers; and Years 4 and 5 will train 50 elementary teachers. The project theme is meeting the 21st Century challenge of helping the increasing numbers of immigrant, English as a Second Language, and disabled students reach proficiency in American history. The goal is systemic reform in a region where many districts have not updated their American history curricula for a decade. Teachers will practice such instructional strategies as historical inquiry skills, differentiated instruction, Understanding by Design, and literacy strategies that address the needs of struggling students. With an eye to replicating the project, leaders have a quasi-experimental design for pilot testing, evaluating and implementing 21st Century Teaching American History. They expect to end with a curriculum that organizes historical facts into big ideas, essential questions, and enduring understandings.