Teachers in eight southeastern New York districts have expressed interest in this project, and its topics were based on teacher-identified priorities. A typical year's activities will include a kickoff session, two after-school sessions, two 3-hour Saturday sessions, two full days of content learning, one or more online sessions and a full-day field trip to a local historic site. During the summer, teachers will attend a 5-day institute with content workshops, visits to historic locations and exploration of primary source documents and instructional strategies. Teachers will participate in one of three tiers: Tier 1 (50 teachers) will constitute the core group, committing to full participation and to mentoring other tiers; Tier 2 (50 teachers) will join in Years 2 and 3, attending many but not all activities; and Tier 3 (up to 100 teachers) will have access to Web tools training and to some other events. Rather than treating history as a set of facts, this project will address historical themes and questions that tell us who we are as Americans and how we got this way. Strategies such as document-based questioning and using primary source documents will support this approach. Teachers will focus on incorporating 21st-century technologies and skills into their practice; to this end, and to limit time away from the classroom, the project will employ both in-person and online activities. The online platform will support conferencing and social networking tools, providing the added benefit of helping teachers build a learning community. The Tier 1 teachers will produce unit plans that will be available on a regional Web site.

In these New York state districts, teachers have minimal American history training and limited access to content-specific training or professional experiences. During each school year, monthly seminars will incorporate recent scholarship and historical thinking skills. These meetings will be supplemented by online book chats using the project's Blackboard site. After completing the 10 seminars, teachers will attend a 5-day summer institute and learn to integrate newly learned content as well as develop tools to evaluate existing teaching materials and student work. By attending the summer institute, teachers will earn three graduate credits from the State University of New York College at Cortland. They also will participate in hands-on field experiences and in a teaching fellows program. Each year, the project will organize four content teams of six teachers, paired with a project historian and master teacher. These teams will develop content-specific curriculum units using the Understanding by Design framework. The project content will emphasize the impact of the nation's foundational documents and events on the lives of ordinary Americans. Highlighting these individual stories will help teachers appreciate the ways Americans have experienced significant turning points in history. Historians will share significant primary sources, identify valuable online archives, and model analysis and interpretation of the materials. The project also will help teachers engage students in critical analysis and higher level thinking. The products will include unit-level teaching materials, a project that superimposes the curriculum onto a U.S. map, and other teacher-created resources, such as the team-developed curriculum units, which will be reviewed for historical accuracy and field-tested to ensure alignment with learning objectives.

This project will serve schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where more than half the 8th-grade students failed the Intermediate Social Studies Test and nearly one-third of eleventh grade students failed the U.S. History and Government Regents Examination, which is required for graduation. For each of the first two years of the project, a cohort of 30 teachers will attend eight full-day workshops, a 5-day summer institute conducted by professional historians and four 2-hour history lectures by professional historians (open to all middle and high school U.S. history teachers in the district); the second cohort will follow this same pattern for Years 3 and 4. During Year 5, 30 teachers—selected from the two cohorts—will attend master American history workshops where they will work collaboratively to develop classroom materials based on the content. Participants will be chosen based on their educational experiences and backgrounds, their preparedness to teach U.S. history, and the levels of their students. The curriculum will demonstrate how history can be studied through the lives of the people who have shaped it; as such, biography will be an important element. The project strategies will include engaging students in hands-on history through oral history; curating museum exhibits in the classroom; encouraging student journalism as a means of exploring history; conducting mock trials and debates; accessing and using appropriate primary sources; integrating books, art and media into the classroom; using technology and Web resources effectively; accessing library and museum collections; and using maps. The products will include lesson plans, presentations, study units, classroom activities and modified primary documents.

This project will serve the public schools of Queens, where nearly 50 percent of 8th-graders have failed the Intermediate Social Studies test and 25 percent of high school students have failed the U.S. History and Government Regents exam. Each year, the project teachers will attend eight 1-day workshops, in which professional historians examine how people have shaped events through interactions, collaborations and conflicts; the teachers will align this content with pedagogical skills and will receive classroom materials, books and history resources, with an emphasis on biographies. An annual 5-day summer institute will cover topics too large in scope to be addressed in a 1-day workshop and will feature field trips to New York City sites. The first cohort of 30 teachers will participate for the first two years, followed by a second cohort of 30 teachers over the next two years. During the fifth year, 30 teachers—selected from the two cohorts—will participate in eight full-day Master American History workshops. The project activities will show teachers how to align content with the New York State Core Curriculum in U.S. history by using strategies that students find engaging, such as curating museum exhibits, writing newspaper articles, role playing and oral history. The teachers also will learn to use media, library and museum collections, and maps; modify primary sources for different learning levels; plan effective field trips; differentiate learning for students with diverse needs and backgrounds; and find easily accessible resources. The teachers' lesson plans and materials will be disseminated through the project's Open Educational Resources Commons Web site.

This large district represents a diverse cross section of students and faculty across New York City. Each year of the project, up to 32 teachers (some continuing for more than 1 year) will participate in (1) a 3-day staff development workshop, which will demonstrate effective methods for teaching American history through historic sites in Philadelphia, New York City and elsewhere in New York state; (2) two 3-hour summer and two 3-hour Saturday workshops, in which teachers will practice using multimedia equipment at the new DiMenna Children's History Museum; and (3) a 3-day summer and a 3-day Saturday workshop to help middle and high school teachers convey the proper historiography skills to prepare their students for participation in National History Day. In addition to the outlined topics and historic site visits, the participants will receive guided tours of these New York Historical Society temporary exhibits: "Life for a Child: Insulin"; "John Rogers: American Stories"; "Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York"; and "New York in World War II." The project will focus on using multimedia and news broadcasting to disseminate facts about historic events, conducting extensive research via public and museum library resources, and engaging students in debates on historical topics and time periods. The strategies will include historical instructional methodologies, differentiated instruction tied to content, and flexible approaches to address various student needs, such as using picture symbols to facilitate communication. Project products will be shared online; these will include lesson plans, alternative assessments, student portfolios and video productions of students and staff.

A Teaching American History initiative was implemented in three of these low-income East Bronx districts beginning in 2003. This new project builds on this earlier grant's success by extending the program to all teachers and schools in the Bronx. Each year, teachers will attend a 2-week summer institute, featuring a morning seminar with a nationally known historian; presentations by educators from the partner organizations; a study of how historical art and artifacts can illuminate content, including curatorial lectures, gallery walks and tours of exhibits and collections; and a history media training workshop. During the school year, teachers will participate in walking tours of New York City, lectures and film study groups. Five cohorts of 25 teachers will receive one year of intensive training in U.S. history content knowledge and aligned pedagogical skills that integrate historical art, artifacts and media into the classroom. Hundreds of other U.S. history teachers also may participate in ancillary program activities. In-depth case studies of New York City history will offer a lens for viewing national events and themes across U.S. history. Teachers will translate their knowledge and skills into original content-rich materials and improved practices. Collaboration through peer networks will help teachers share and develop common strategies for instructing all students. Once teachers complete the program, they will become teacher historians, continuing to develop their content knowledge and supporting other teachers. The participants will develop classroom materials, including lesson plans, activities using media, History in a Box artifacts and documents, and curriculum units.

The districts participating in this project are all New York City charter schools with limited funds for professional development; this consortium will help them meet a common need. During the school year, teachers will have seven 3-hour workshops as well as six hours of classroom-based modeling and guided practice; summer activities will include three 5-hour sessions. All of these events will include both content and pedagogy, and locations will be split between Columbia University, the home school, local museums and historic sites. Five cohorts of 32 teachers, one each year of the grant, will participate. Each will study the same time periods, but will have a different annual focus (see topics, above). One project goal is to create a community of learners that will expand to other charter schools. Teachers will all study the same historical content, then learn grade-appropriate approaches to teaching it. For example, when studying Jacksonian Democracy (universal suffrage for white males, an economy that depended on slavery, the shifting understanding of citizenship), elementary students might work from an old photo to create a short biography showing how events impacted the person's life. Middle school students might create a board game based on an important industry of the time, and high school students might write newspaper editorials that take opposing views of an issue. Teachers will create a variety of products, including lesson plans, journal articles, conference presentations and videos; all will be available on the Web sites of local, regional and national organizations as well as through professional conferences and publications.

Middle and high school students in this diverse, low-income Bronx district have traditionally scored poorly on the New York statewide U.S. History Regents exam; also, teachers have little access to history-related professional development. Each year, the project will involve 32 teacher leaders in a week-long summer institute in which they will share primary and secondary sources to develop curriculum units and field-test U.S. history lessons with summer school students. At the institute, they will form curriculum design teams and participate in 11 meetings throughout the year to discuss content aligned with the targeted National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) periods. A total of 75 teachers will attend lectures twice a year, and 100 teachers will participate in two history forums per year, featuring lectures, primary source work and sharing of curriculum design team units. The participants will rotate each year with some overlap of teachers. The content will be based on a key premise—participation in society as educated citizens and voters requires students to understand the development of our democratic institutions and ideas. The project will extend teachers' ability to use primary sources, Web tools and inquiry strategies. Participating teachers will work within curriculum design teams—comprising a team historian, a teacher educator and eight high school teachers—to develop two units per year that align with the NAEP U.S. history themes and periods. A Web site will host these units, which will include primary and secondary sources, teaching strategies, lesson plans, activities and high-quality assessments. They will also share these materials through 2-day professional development history forums.

A large majority of history teachers in these New Jersey districts expressed interest in having professional development opportunities to interact with historical experts, enrich their content knowledge and integrate primary sources into classrooms. In this project, 45 middle and high school teachers will engage in a 5-year examination of the major ideas, people, events and developments in American history from a constitutional perspective. Each year, the focal point will be an 8-day summer seminar at Princeton University to address content and make teachers aware of the relatively recent emphasis on social history. An additional 3.5 days of after-school professional development will be conducted each year to focus on content, curriculum and pedagogy. At least 85 teachers will be recruited, with 45 selected randomly as the experimental group and approximately 40 constituting the control group. Content time periods were selected because of the dramatic and polarizing debates that decisively shaped American political and constitutional perspectives for succeeding generations. These historical developments demonstrate the evolution of freedom and democracy as well as constitutional norms and understandings. Attention will be given to developing pedagogical skills to guide teachers and their students in gathering, examining and organizing historical data to make historical explanations, with particular emphasis on historical writing. Participating teachers will receive New Jersey professional development credit hours and may also receive graduate credits from the College of Education at Ashland University in Ohio upon payment of tuition. The project Web site will feature video recordings of the scholarly lectures and examples of lesson plans and other materials developed by the teachers.