Worcester Public Schools in Massachusetts serves a significant population of immigrants and English Language Learners in high-need urban schools where many teachers are teaching U.S. history for the first time. All 155 teachers in the district will be required to participate in Securing the Blessings of Liberty. Four annual professional development days will take place during the school day and will consist of a morning lecture, workshops on teaching with primary source materials, and teaching labs dedicated to integrating new content and pedagogical knowledge into classroom instruction. The district’s 55 fifth grade history teachers will participate in Years 2-3; its 100 high school teachers will participate in Years 2-5; and a cohort of 15 future coaches from both groups will participate in Years 1-5. The coaching cohort will also take part in a year-long study of the Constitution that includes graduate courses, independent research projects, and development of a curricular unit. In addition, they will provide professional development and coaching to the district's history teachers. Securing the Blessings of Liberty will serve 155 elementary and high school teachers. History content will focus on the Constitutional themes of individual rights and communal responsibilities, the divisions of federal power, and the role of the federal government, especially in relationship to local and state government. Using differentiated instruction to help students understand and interpret primary source documents and artifacts will be emphasized. Coach-developed curriculum units that incorporate 10 to 15 primary source documents and artifacts will be made available to history teachers across the district.

History Connected is being implemented through a consortium of nine school districts in southeastern Pennsylvania. Eighteen low-performing schools within the consortium will be given preference during recruitment. A variety of annual professional development activities will prepare participating teachers to deliver American history as a stand-alone course: six school-day seminars (five on connecting history content to state standards and one on technology integration); a pre-institute orientation day in June with an online component; a 5-day summer content institute; five 2-hour book discussion/study groups based on biographies, memoirs, and historical works related to the year's theme; an online Professional Learning Community; and a 3-hour after-school "sharing conference" in Years 2 and 3. Each teacher will also develop two work products such as book reviews, lesson plans, and multimedia presentations. At least one participant in each district will be designated as a teacher fellow. Fellows will provide leadership and support for improving history education within their districts. History Connected will serve 40 teachers annually (120 over the life of the grant). Some teachers may participate in a "part-time" track if they are unable to complete all project activities. Teachers will learn to draw connections across time and place to the enduring themes and issues of American history. Instructional strategies will incorporate differentiated instruction, technology, historical thinking skills, and research skills using primary source documents and cultural artifacts. Project evaluation reports, historical resources, teacher work products, and curricula and lesson plans that incorporate differentiated instruction will be published on the program Web site.

High-stakes tests, budget cuts, and underprepared teachers are impacting these Massachusetts districts, where neighborhoods range from middle class to working class to under-resourced. Some districts are classified as in need of improvement and have no funds for professional development. Some districts are culturally diverse, with about half their students born into a home where a language other than English is spoken. All the lowest performing districts will have teachers participating in A More Perfect Union, where annual activities will include four half-day workshops, extensive readings, and an 8-day summer seminar. Extra workshop sessions will support teachers in the two most at-risk districts. One group of 45 teachers from all school levels will be recruited to participate for the first three years, and they will be prepared to support their colleagues when their training is complete. Underlying the A More Perfect Union activities is a focus on the origins and evolution of America's fundamental political ideas, traditions, and constitutional institutions. Drawing on the philosophy of history and research on pedagogy, historians and master teachers will help participating teachers develop historical habits of mind and learn how to incorporate these habits into the worldview of students. In addition, master teachers will provide classroom support for implementing new practices and for creating new lesson plans. The creation of a project Web site that contains historical materials, essays on issues and events, lesson plans, and other teaching materials will help sustain the project's effects when the grant period is complete.

The CHARMS Collaborative in Massachusetts is instituting A More Perfect Union in consortium with selected school districts from the Bi-County and North River Collaboratives. The program will work most intensely in three districts located south of Boston that have not met annual instructional goals. Teachers who receive professional development through the program will do a significant amount of reading in the philosophy and pedagogy of history. Each year, they will participate in an 8-day summer seminar, a field trip, and four half-day meetings during the school year that address implementation of seminar content. Classroom implementation of teacher-created lesson plans will be facilitated by three coordinators and a pedagogical specialist. The same 45 teachers will participate throughout all three years of the program. They will explore the origins and evolution of America's fundamental political ideals, traditions, and constitutional institutions. Because the targeted districts include an increasing number of English Language Learners, A More Perfect Union will emphasize strategies that complement the Sheltered Instructional Observation Protocol. Also, teachers will learn to situate events within narrative frameworks and incorporate biography in their teaching. A project Web site will include the syllabi of the summer seminars and advice for their use in venues beyond the collaborative. The site will also house historical materials, essays, model lesson plans, and other teaching materials.

Teachers in five public school districts in Massachusetts—Burlington, Bedford, Lexington, Woburn, and Somerville—have identified professional development in American history as a "high need" as they serve many immigrant and migrant English Language Learners who lack a solid foundation in U.S. history. Making Freedom will offer professional development that features summer institutes, 3-day seminars, and 9-day study tours, with separate tracks for elementary and secondary teachers. Other activities will include a day-long workshop and two 3-hour after-school workshops annually on technology integration, continuation activities to ensure effective application of teacher work products, four history book groups a year, and collaborative activities that include a blog and participation in full-day conferences in Years 2, 3, and 4. Incentives such as stipends and college credits will be used to recruit an average of 90 teachers each year. After completing either the summer institutes or the core school year programs, participants can apply for a study tour, with the school districts’ goal being development of a pool of master teachers. Program activities will revolve around the people, perspectives, documents, and events involved in "making freedom." Instructional strategies will integrate differentiated instruction, historical thinking skills, and technology to develop students’ document analysis and inquiry skills. Teacher work products—reflective papers, research papers, discussion journals, book reviews, lesson plans, blog posts, and multimedia presentations—will be disseminated via the program Web site and at project conferences.

These northeastern Massachusetts districts have underperforming elementary and middle schools that need improvement, history teachers who need training for recertification, and high schools that need to increase the numbers of students who take honors or Advanced Placement history courses. Imagination, Invention and Innovation aims to meet these needs through annual week-long summer institutes, two full-day content workshops, two or three afterschool book discussions, one or more local field trips, and two technology seminars. Every year will offer a 4-day study tour of regional sites, and an annual conference will bring together a keynote speaker and teacher presentations based on work done during the year. The project has two tracks—elementary and secondary. In addition, 10 graduate students who are preservice teachers will also participate. As they work toward embedding current historical scholarship and strong pedagogical skills into teaching, elementary teachers will focus on U.S. history as it relates to historical and geographical topics, plus early settlement and state history. Secondary teachers will consider key themes, including colonization, the Revolution and early Republic, the Civil War and Reconstruction, immigration, and the development of modern America. Strategies will include using biography, historical fiction, and visual arts to enrich teaching, strengthening the use of instructional technology, and combining lectures and facilitated discussion with experiential, hands-on learning and self-discovery. These strategies will be modeled by academic historians during content workshops. After the grant ends, project impact will be sustained by a teacher-scholar network supported by technology, teacher-created resource guides focused on specific topics and adaptable for classroom use, and teacher-developed curriculum modules.

Prince George's County, the 15th largest district in the country, has a student population more than 95 percent minority—a reflection, in part, of its large African American middle class. The district is classified as in need of improvement and has a disproportionate number of inexperienced, unlicensed teachers at low-performing schools. Its proximity to the nation's capital and to some remarkable experiments in suburban living (e.g., the New Deal community of Greenbelt) makes visits to key sites accessible for experiential learning by teachers and students. Each 2-year program of American History at Home will include a 2-day introduction, six 2-day bridge sessions and three 5-day summer institutes, all of which will be integrated with pedagogy sessions that transfer the content knowledge into practice. For participating in these activities, teachers will earn six graduate-level history course credits and three graduate-level education course credits. The project will train two 2-year cohorts of 50 teachers each. Because of the great need among ninth grade students, the goal will be to recruit 30 percent of teachers from this grade level. American History at Home will explore two thematic questions: (1) How did depression, war, and postwar growth reshape local communities? and, (2) What role did science and technology play in the histories of the county and of the nation during this period? Beginning with assigned readings and writing tasks, teachers will explore several interpretive frameworks and historiographic debates (e.g., consensus vs. conflict, technological momentum, statism and anti-statism). Pedagogical strategies will include creating multimedia classroom activities and employing strategic historical thinking.

Ouachita Parish School System in rural northeastern Louisiana is joining with four other school districts to implement ,em>North Louisiana: Exploring the American Experience. Thirty-nine of the 84 schools in these districts are performing below expectations, and no schools in the district offer in-service programs in American history. Each summer, participating teachers from all five districts will attend a grade-level-specific summer institute that meets three hours a day, four days a week, for four weeks. Two hours of each day will be devoted to content and one hour will be allotted for a master teacher to work with teachers on pedagogy. Teachers will receive three hours of graduate credit upon completion of each summer institute, which will be supplemented throughout the year by spring and fall in-service workshops, readings, field trips to local museums and historic sites, and study of primary and Internet-based sources. The program will serve a 5-year cohort of 69 elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers. These teachers will study significant issues, episodes, events, and turning points in national history and explore their connections to art, music, literature, Louisiana history, and foreign relations. The instructional emphasis will be on the use of new media and online resources at national repositories to enrich students' learning experiences. During and after the grant period, a program Web site will inform history teachers of additional professional development opportunities, house teacher-developed lesson plans, and link teachers to one another and to state and national history repositories.

The Project PAST consortium includes both the regular and special education cooperatives for central Kentucky. They serve six districts that are in some phase of corrective action. Teachers in this rural region have had few opportunities for history professional development, and many would not be considered highly qualified to teach American history. Each year, the project plans to address a broad topic through six components: six historical encounters, a 3-day summer colloquium, a 2-day historical field institute, a mentoring and observation opportunity, three 5-hour online learning sessions, and two day-long curriculum institutes. Two cohorts of 50 high school teachers will participate; the first in Years 1 to 3 and the second in Years 4 and 5. As one strategy to achieve its goal of fusing immersion in content with training in practical classroom application, Project PAST will prepare the members of Cohort 1 to act as coaches to teachers in Cohort 2. All teachers will gain experience with using original documents, collaborating in grade-level teams, addressing the multiple abilities of students, and spiraling content to lead students from basic to critical thinking. Strategies will include theory-based instruction, creating standards-based lessons and authentic assessments, peer mentoring, and observation using a standard walk-through protocol, and integrating the fine arts and the humanities into history instruction. Project products will include a Moodle site—an Intranet-based learning platform that houses online lessons, discussions boards, curriculum, and interactive teaching resources—and a collection of standards-based lessons created by participants that will be available to all teachers in the consortium.

The Clio Project serves Iowa's capitol, where the student population is diverse and gaps in student achievement are becoming urgent in the middle and high schools. The district intends to redesign its history curriculum to include primary sources and historical thinking, along with a learner-centered approach to instruction. Clio will address student achievement through activities that strengthen teacher knowledge about increasing student engagement, providing experiences with primary sources in print, multimedia and digital formats, and studying artifacts, historical sites, and oral history with historians and scholars. During project activities, Clio teachers will contribute to redesigning the American history curriculum and developing authentic student learning assessments. The project will recruit teacher participation at three levels: Level I teachers will be core group members (35 each for middle and high school) and will work toward leadership roles to support implementing the new curriculum. These teachers must attend at least 80 percent of activities. Level II teachers will attend 75 percent of activities to receive professional development credit, and Level III teachers will attend sessions of their choice with no participation requirement. Clio, the Greek muse of history, serves as the project's thematic guide for deepening teachers' knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of American history. The instructional strategies for this purpose include developing historical thinking skills, working with primary sources, and using authentic research. Attention will be paid to differentiating instruction, teaching literacy in content areas, problem-based learning, and other research-based approaches. In addition to teacher-created lessons, the Clio Project will make an important contribution to the district's new curriculum and assessment tools.