Cobb County is northwest of Atlanta, near the borders of Tennessee and Alabama. Student performance on the history portion of state graduation tests has fallen in recent years, and district history teachers have had access to little or no professional development. Each semester, this project will deliver three symposia and two field trips, a book study, and workshops for developing curriculum materials. Each year, leading historians will present a 5-day summer seminar that will include lectures and materials, historian guidance during a field study, and opportunities for teachers to confer with experts in the field. The project will serve an annual cadre of 30 high school teachers; Year 1 participants will be encouraged to stay on, and any who leave will be replaced by new teachers. Applicants will be screened to select those who have the greatest need. By providing a cutting-edge professional development experience, the district aims to develop a cadre of lead teachers and mentors who can work across the district and the state. Symposia will be led by guest historians, and primary source materials will be reviewed for historical interpretation, point of view and analysis. Field studies will be designed to include history content and exploration of primary sources. Strategies will include use of History Habits of Mind, document-based questioning and the Understanding by Design process. Every teacher will design at least one lesson per year, and these resources will be available on the district and project Web sites. Participants will present at local and state conferences and will be encouraged to apply to national conferences.

A recent study demonstrates that teachers in this Florida district have limited accessibility to professional development in history and, due to limited budgets, lack resources and teaching materials. In this project, teachers will participate in at least 80 percent of the professional development opportunities. In Years 2 to 5, they will attend a summer institute, which will include a 2- or 3-day colloquium from the National Council for History Education, followed by 2 days of curriculum design from the University of Central Florida. Each year, the project will feature five online history webinar discussions from the National Humanities Center, two Saturday teaching history workshops from the University of Central Florida, a Saturday seminar or field study academy from the Florida Humanities Council to examine historic topics in depth, and a 3- to 5-day summer field study academy at historic sites relevant to the time period being studied. The project will involve 30 teachers, with the goal of recruiting 10 each from elementary, middle and high schools. Teachers will interact with historians, master teachers and curriculum specialists to examine, analyze and synthesize historical knowledge by reviewing primary and secondary sources. All activities will integrate educational technology and emphasize the use of resources to help history teachers improve their classroom practice. Annually, teachers will create at least one comprehensive lesson and then field-test it with students, revise it as needed and submit it to the project coordinator for review.

E Pluribus Unum: One Nation, One People will be developed in one Florida district, where assessment data indicate that American history is seldom taught in depth at the elementary level and that such knowledge is not being retained by middle and high school students. Each year, the project teachers must participate in at least three professional development sessions for a minimum of 30 hours, including at least one professional learning community or graduate course; take a nationally validated assessment; and complete follow-ups for all professional development activities. Those who meet the requirements will be eligible for an annual stipend; those who complete a graduate course will receive tuition reimbursements and stipends. The project presenters—local history experts, history professors, pedagogical experts and curriculum coordinators—will provide history content expertise, pedagogical training, historical research and/or historical thinking that applies to classrooms. The project strategies will focus on collaborations among teachers, history experts and the partners, supported through (1) Professional Learning Communities, where teachers can collectively study and inquire about topics, lessons and books; and (2) research opportunities and internships offered by the partnering museums and local university's history department. Project teachers will produce lesson plans and demonstrate lessons as follow-ups to the professional development; plans that demonstrate the necessary quality, impact and ease of implementation will be posted on a Web site and made available to all teachers. In addition, the Web site will feature other related resources, including videos of the lessons being delivered, the locations of local historic sites and museums, lists of available field trips and links to other useful sites.

In 2008-09, this district had an average of only 14.2 percent of students in Grades 8 and 11 proficient in American history. Teachers will be able to participate in a variety of weekend institutes that deliver content and methods training, local field experiences and end-of-year expeditions to national sites, and 5-day summer workshops. In addition, 40 teachers each summer can take credit-bearing graduate courses that will be delivered in a combination of in-person and online media. Teachers will come from the schools where students have the greatest need. To ensure that resources and activities complement grade-level standards, teachers will participate in an elementary/middle or high school cohort. Each summer's field experiences will align with the year's topic, and the two cohorts will study historical eras that align to content they teach in the classroom. Sessions on pedagogy and opportunities to collect resources for classroom use will be incorporated into all activities. The project Web site will house teacher blogs, reading lists, lesson plans, videos, journal entries and more; an annual product will highlight project activities to other teachers and the community at large (e.g., in Year 3, teachers will research and create archives on four local leaders for whom schools are named). At the end of the three years, teachers will host an Academy of American History Forum for all Duval County history teachers, where they will present workshops and lectures highlighting the experiences and materials developed under the grant.

A survey demonstrated that more than one-third of social studies teachers in Washington, D.C., have less than three years of experience. Each year, teachers will attend a summer institute at American University featuring two graduate-level courses: one in American history and the other in historical pedagogy. Throughout this institute, the teachers will be introduced to current historiography, public history in the form of archeology and exhibitions at historic sites, and a range of primary and secondary sources—from maps to material culture—that will be incorporated into lesson plans and curricular units. Each history content course will follow the same pattern: professors alternating lectures, field studies and discussions, while teachers collect video and documentary data for their curricular units. They also will attend a series of Saturday workshops. Eighty teachers will participate for three years with the possibility of a 2-year extension. The project will provide tangible connections to the past that can reveal social and cultural history through the built environment and memory studies. It will blend the content with visits to local historic sites, such as Mount Vernon, the Frederick Douglass House and the H Street Corridor. The teachers will discuss and adapt the substance and methods of academic and public historians' work to create robust learning environments, develop new strategies for engaging students in working with historic places and primary and secondary sources, develop techniques for integrating technology into curricular planning, and contextualize and integrate the district's instructional vision of the Teaching and Learning Framework into teachers' curricular units, which will be made available online.

These districts—the two largest in Delaware—are rated below target in terms of Adequate Yearly Progress. In addition, their American history teachers lack adequate preparation in their subject area. Each year of the project will include four 2-day American history workshops and two week-long summer institutes with field trips for two cohorts of 25 teachers and administrators, who will work in professional learning communities and lesson study teams. Cohort A will learn about events through the Civil War, while Cohort B will focus on post-Civil War history. To prevent attrition and ensure full impact, the project will employ an incentive system in which teachers and administrators who participate for three years will receive annually enhanced stipends. All topics are related to the theme of freedom. The project will concentrate on major eras of American history and more focused case studies of selected turning points in the evolution of freedom. The project Web site will feature videotaped sessions that allow visitors to view guided practice lesson presentations by the instructional specialist, a reader-response blog in which visitors can respond to recommended readings and research lessons, a forum in which visitors can recommend and discuss American history resources and best practices, an "Ask the Historian" component that allows participants to communicate with the project's guest historians, and a featured book site that draws attention to new and notable books.