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.

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.

The Monroe County Community School Corporation in southern Indiana is a comprehensive school district with a large research university in its midst. The district includes both high and low-achieving schools, and its students come from ethnically, economically, and socially diverse backgrounds. Teachers in Monroe County's lowest-performing schools will be targeted for recruitment to the History Education Project. In Year 1, professional development activities will include three weekend retreats that incorporate seminars and field trips, two evening book discussions, lesson planning consultations, a classroom observation, and a culminating spring conference. Years 2 and 3 will feature a 5-day summer seminar, spring and fall retreats, two evening book discussions, lesson planning consultations, two classroom observations, and a culminating spring conference. A historian-in-residence, along with master teachers, will assist each teacher in the development of 15 powerful lessons in American history. Up to 30 of the district's 133 history teachers will be recruited, and they will participate in all three years of the program. Each year's themes will be investigated through case studies of the period, with an emphasis on connecting Indiana people, places, events, and historical turning points to the larger American scene. The History Education Project will integrate four dimensions of instruction: thinking historically, utilizing primary resources, teaching big ideas, and posing multiple perspectives. The program will maintain an interactive Web site as a repository of field-tested U.S. history instructional resources.

The People and Places consortium is in southern Illinois just east of the Mississippi River and near St. Louis. It has 23 schools in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring. Many elementary teachers do not have history teaching endorsements. Secondary teachers who participated in a previous Teaching American History grant will mentor elementary teachers as they design lessons and create Web-based portfolios related to the content of seminars, summer institutes, study tours to historical sites, and other activities. Participants will network with teachers outside the project and with preservice teachers in quarterly reading seminars, Web-supported discussions, and 1-day workshops. People and Places is designed to support the elementary teachers who introduce students to their first experience with U.S. history. To this end, it hopes to develop at least one teacher leader per building in consortium schools. Three cohorts of 40 teachers will participate for three years each and experience identical content organized around the theme of exploring the nation through the historical contexts that shaped and transformed its ideological heritage. During this exploration, teachers will engage in rigorous, research-based strategies such as higher level questioning and differentiating for different ability levels, integrating technology into teaching and learning, and applying historical thinking skills. The content of this professional development will rely in part on local and national primary sources, and teachers will learn how to turn their classrooms into historical laboratories. People and Places participants will share units of study they develop during the project and join a county-wide cadre to improve American history education.

Located in a rural town near Boise, the Kuna district is in its fifth year of improvement: only one of eight district schools made Adequate Yearly Progress in 2007-2008. In project Year 1, master teacher trainees will spend 175 hours in field studies, collaboration with partners, workshops, book studies, and design of summer institutes for subsequent years. Thereafter, teachers will receive more than 75 hours of research-based professional development as they participate in workshops, book studies, and summer institutes. Year 1 will develop four master teachers; Years 2 to 5 will bring in about 35 more teachers overall. The project goal is to develop 19 teacher-leaders and approximately 20 additional teachers with strong content knowledge, pedagogical background, and resources. The underlying purpose of the Struggles and Resilience project is to develop American history as a separate academic subject that is supported by resident historians and pedagogical experts. In Year 1, master teachers will participate in individualized and collaborative field study, primary source research, and intense learning sessions with local and national history experts. In the following years, the master teachers will work with historians and other educators to help participating teachers build their content knowledge and instructional skills. History content will draw connections between traditional American history and state and local histories. Pedagogy will be based on nine essential strategies outlined in Classroom Instruction That Works. Participating teachers will earn college credits and/or history endorsements or certifications. All district teachers will benefit from lesson plans created during project activities.

Within the districts in this northeast Georgia region, 15 schools did not make Adequate Yearly Progress in 2008, and 13 schools are in need of improvement. On the 2008 history tests for Grades 4, 8, and high school, 35 percent or more of the region’s students did not meet state standards. Teaching American History in Georgia's Classic Region will expand teachers' content knowledge and help them develop their pedagogical skills. Seminars, field studies, and summer institutes will be led by historians and master educators who will help teachers gain an increased appreciation of traditional American history. Professional Learning Communities, meeting both face-to-face and online, will collaborate to create lesson plans. A cohort of 60 teachers will include 30 from Grades 3-5 and 30 from middle and high schools; priority will be given to teachers from the schools most in need of improvement. Instructional strategies for this project include Understanding by Design and using historical thinking skills. Each year, these will be applied to content from the selected topic area/historical period. The project will produce technology-based collaborative instructional units that incorporate primary sources, local history resources, Web sites, and databases. All units will be reviewed by an advisory board and mounted on the project Web site to share with teachers in Georgia and across the nation. In addition, materials related to the book studies, blogs, podcasts, lectures, and presentations will be available online for all teachers in the project service area. In addition, teachers will conduct model demonstration lessons in their local schools and districts to sustain the project's impact over time.

The two metro-Atlanta districts participating in this project include several schools identified as in need of improvement, and one district has not made Adequate Yearly Progress for four years: student scores on state and other standardized tests have been below state averages. Building Connections teachers will interact with historians and colleagues from different grade levels as they attend summer institutes and evening lectures and visit national and local historic sites and archival facilities. Small cohorts will meet during the school year to discuss content and instruction and to collaborate on assignments. Stipends and a competitive application process will be used to recruit 250 Tier 1 teachers (50 per cohort, with one cohort in Year 1, two cohorts in Year 2, and two cohorts in Year 3) and 50 Tier 2 teachers (one cohort for three years, starting in Year 1), with preference given to those from low-performing schools. Throughout the project, themes will center on placing significant individuals, events, and issues into the context of our nation's foundation and civic ideals. Around this content, Building Connections will help teachers learn to integrate several instructional approaches into their practice, such as using nonfiction materials and primary source documents, conducting research, using technology, and incorporating history into reading and writing. During the 5-year project, each Tier 1 teacher will compile a portfolio that includes lesson plans, primary sources, visuals, portraits, and objects. Tier 2 teachers will produce learning packages that include lesson plans, artifacts, and primary documents. All lesson plans will be compiled and shared with other teachers.

Located in the Atlanta metro area, this district's students are predominantly minority, ethnically and linguistically diverse, and from low-income families. Twenty-five of its 125 schools are in need of improvement. SHIFT participants will interact with respected historians at annual kick-off events, through two hybrid graduate-level courses each year, and during annual summer academies located at historical sites. Teachers will have funding to gather resources for their classroom libraries during field experiences and will receive other resources during SHIFT activities. The project will serve five cohorts of 30 teachers each, with teachers coming from all school levels and each cohort participating for two years. SHIFT will explore a variety of themes, including interactions of peoples, cultures, and ideas; change and continuity in American democracy; and the changing role of America in the world. Instructional strategies will focus on applying thoughtful exploration and critical analysis to understand history, and on making history an engaging, immersive, and relevant academic subject. Teachers will reflect, collaborate, and refer to the SHIFT blueprint for guidance on building an ideal classroom environment for history teaching and learning. Teachers who complete the professional development will have classroom libraries with multimedia resources, an expanded repertoire of teaching practices, deeper content knowledge, and collegial relationships that will support their future practice.