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.

Keystones of the Federal Union (Keystones)is a joint project of the Central Susquehanna and Capital Area Intermediate Units in Pennsylvania, which serve 33 low-performing schools. Teachers in these schools will be given priority status during recruitment. The project's professional development activities will include a day-long forum to introduce historical research and interpretation skills, a week-long summer institute that includes field trips to historical sites, development of a lesson and three extended learning station activities, a series of six to eight Wiki conversations on scholarly works, historical children’s books, electronic resources, and cultural artifacts, and a daylong final forum to share lessons. Teacher librarians will be asked to develop a collection of American history resources and to collaborate with a participating teacher on the development of lessons and activities. The program is aimed at 30 teachers and teacher librarians each year. These participants will explore the keystone principles embodied in some of Pennsylvania's and the nation's most iconic documents and see how those principles applied to their forbears' day-to-day lives. Teachers and librarians will learn about instructional strategies that incorporate primary sources and artifacts, higher order thinking, and extended learning activities. Specific strategies will include use of extended thinking skills, summarization, vocabulary in context, advance organizers, and nonverbal representations. All lessons and learning activities created through the program will be posted on a Wiki to be shared with current and future Keystones participants.

Rochester ranks highest among New York State's urban districts for poverty, and its mainly non-White students speak more than 35 languages. Six district elementary schools are designated as in need of improvement, and 30 percent of district social studies teachers have less than three years of teaching experience. Each year, Elementary Historians will provide a 20-hour summer institute, on-site coaching, and four 2-hour theme-based lectures with hands-on exploration of documents and artifacts and lesson development. The participant cohort will emphasize fourth and fifth grade teachers, with a goal of reaching 100 percent of such teachers in the six neediest schools and 30 percent of such teachers across the district. Bilingual and special education teachers, certified library media specialists, reading coaches, art and music teachers, and English language arts specialists will be invited to participate if space permits. The project will focus on building a bridge between teachers, historians, and students, and on connecting schools to community institutions. In addition to university and local historians, full-time content area coaches will work with participants. These coaches will deliver school-based strategic teaching sessions and model classrooms to help teachers transfer what they learn to their practice. Strategies will include using primary documents and historical thinking skills to help students recognize connections between historic and present-day events. The project will establish an ongoing teacher resource library, and participants will develop lesson plans that align with state standards and employ engaging, research-based strategies. All workshops will be videotaped and mounted on the district's intranet, where all teachers can access the content and discussions.

In these western New York state districts, teachers have few opportunities for history professional development and, because of state certification requirements, most have little formal preparation in American history. Setting Our Sites on History (Setting Our Sites) will address teachers' needs with 90 hours of professional development in a yearlong program: eight school-day workshops to present content, three Saturday workshops to design service learning activities, and a 4-day residential summer institute in Washington, D.C. to link local themes into a national framework. Historians and a regional archivist will present content in a site-based learning format, with sessions to be held at museums and historical landmarks. Each annual cohort of 25 teachers will be joined by future teachers of social studies from Buffalo State College—either in classrooms as student teachers or in project activities. Setting Our Sites will explore the ramifications and ideas behind the American ideal of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This theme will link an exploration of the experiences of eight groups of people in American history who have struggled for and among one another for full rights (Native Americans, soldiers, pioneers, immigrants, women, children, the working class and African Americans). Instructional strategies will include a focus on service learning, which will have teachers design activities to engage students with local and national history. After completing the year-long training, teachers will mentor their colleagues to improve history teaching and employ service learning to build the collections of and interactions with historical sites and museums.

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.

Led by the Miller R-II School District, a consortium of 14 rural Missouri school districts in need of improvement will address teachers' underpreparation in history education by implementing the Preserving America's Midwestern Heritage Fellowship. The fellowship program will offer 40 to 70 teachers of history in Grades 3-12 two professional development tracks. Those who choose Track 1 will attend at least six 3-hour content seminars that include content and instructional skills training in inquiry; they may also opt to attend a 5-day summer travel institute. Those in Track 2 will attend a 2-day fall colloquium, a 2-day spring colloquium, four and a half days of research and review, and a 5-day summer travel institute. Teachers in both tracks will attend Talking History Webinars, prepare standards-based units, lessons, and/or other lesson materials, and receive classroom coaching that employs the thereNow IRIS telepresence coaching system. Five participants will become lead teachers and provide turnkey trainings for history teachers across the consortium. Each year, fellows will research and study the political, economic, legal, social and ideological contrasts found throughout American history. They will learn to use the Binary Paideia paradigm, the American Institute for History Education Signature Strategies, and the CICERO "digital toolbox" of resources to implement grade-appropriate, inquiry-based teaching in their classrooms. Fellows will create historical narratives and interactive lessons that will be shared on the fellowship Web site. In addition, they will create "traveling trunks" that will be available for check-out to teachers across the consortium.

An earlier Teaching American History grant in this Michigan district supported teachers in Grades 5, 8 and 10. Fifth grade teachers noticed that students were arriving with insufficient background knowledge and historical inquiry skills. Digging Into the Past activities are designed to help teachers prepare students in earlier grades. Content and instructional specialists will lead half and full-day seminars, afterschool workshops, book study groups, lectures, teacher projects with graduate credit available, and sessions on developing grade-level lesson plans. Six grade-level history teams will be formed to involve all elementary teachers in the district. Using a two-track system—one more intensive than the other—will make appropriate amounts of professional development available to every teacher. Track 1, the more intensive, will consist of teachers in Grades 2 through 5; Track 2 will consist of kindergarten and Grade 1 teachers. The theme of Digging Into the Past is examining patterns of movement and settlement in American history and how the archeological record helps us understand these patterns. An archeology team will oversee excavations and bring specialized content knowledge into the activities, and each grade-level team will have historians assigned as mentors. K-4 teachers will learn to integrate history and literacy by using history-related books to bring history alive. Grade 5 teachers will synthesize and connect earlier history experiences for students when they begin to study history as a separate subject. The principal academies will help principals learn to evaluate history instruction in the classroom. Throughout the project, teachers will collaborate to develop engaging lessons that integrate literacy and align with state standards.

These western Massachusetts districts are a mix of rural and urban geography. They have a total of 20 schools in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, and teachers need and want professional development opportunities. Each year, Visions of Liberty and Equality will offer a 5-day summer institute that features travel to regional sites combined with lectures and discussion related to the sites. Other events will include two full-day seminars—one in the fall and one in the spring—to study grade-appropriate content delivery (e.g., theater, writing, video), two book discussion groups, and a showcase of effective content delivery practices. Years 1-4 will have separate cohorts of 35 teachers; Years 4 and 5 will add 2-year training for a cohort of 10-15 mentors, who will be drawn from previous years' participants. In Year 5, the mentors will work with a cohort of 15 new or preservice teachers. Taking the history of human rights in America as its theme, Liberty and Equality will bring together academic historians, archival research specialists, museum educators, and experienced teachers to introduce content and historical thinking skills such as historical debate and controversy, bias and point of view, research and analysis of primary sources, and others. The goal is to spiral curriculum development from local to regional to national over time, and each teacher will create lesson plans and assemble a personal instructional archive of photos, artifacts, documents, and other teaching materials. Teachers and partners will contribute to the project Web site, which will be stocked with content, lesson plans, and avenues for teachers to connect with one another.

Four of the five Becoming America districts are on the urban rim of Boston, and the fifth is a suburban district. The four urban rim districts have large multicultural populations resulting from recent influxes of immigrants, and many schools are either not making Adequate Yearly Progress or are in corrective action or restructuring. The project will immerse teachers in activities that provide intensive history content and collaborations with historians and master teachers. Every year, 13 seminars and a summer institute, along with a collaborative Web space, will support teachers' learning. Each annual cohort of 25 teachers will be selected from the schools most in need of improvement, yielding a total of 125 teachers who benefit directly from the project. The theme of exploring the role of immigrants in American history during the country’s expansion will help teachers make content relevant to the students in their classrooms. Becoming America will emphasize instructional strategies that develop student inquiry through project-based learning. To support this approach, teachers will learn to incorporate the use of educational technology and primary sources (e.g., national documents, individual records), information from local and national historic archives and libraries, and resources such as museums and historic sites into their classroom instruction. Every Becoming America teacher will develop and implement a project-based lesson. These lessons will be grouped into topic-related units and distributed to all schools electronically.