The School District of Manatee County, located on Florida's west coast, includes 33 elementary schools, eight of which are Title I schools that have not achieved Adequate Yearly Progress for multiple years. Across the district, recent student performance in American history has been poor. The Foundations of Freedom Liberty Fellowship (Foundations) will give priority to teachers in low-performing elementary schools and provide 14 days of professional development each year: a 2-day fall colloquium, a 3-day winter colloquium, a 2-day study trip, four half-days of research and review, and a 5-day summer institute. A technology-enabled classroom coaching program will help participating teachers refine their lesson design and delivery. All 170 of the district’s teachers in Grades 3-5 will be encouraged to attend Talking History Webinars once a month and will have online access to CICERO teaching resources. Foundations will accommodate 40 fellows each year. Five experienced teachers from the initial cohort will be trained as teacher-leaders, and they will replicate portions of the fellowship training to help all district history teachers create engaging history lessons and activities. The thematic focus will be on how geography, economics, and political thought have contributed to events in traditional American history. Strong emphasize will be given to teachers and students reading and discussing American history issues, documents, events, and personalities. Teachers will be trained to use the American Institute for History Education's Signature Strategies, including the Binary Paideia approach, to promote historical thinking and enhance classroom instruction. Historical narratives, "virtual field tours," and other teacher-created resources will be posted on the project Web site.

Lake County School District in central Florida includes 42 schools, 12 of which have been identified through Florida's Differentiated Accountability Model as in need of improvement. Since 2001, Lake County's population has increased by more than 38 percent, and the district has hired hundreds of new teachers in response to increased student enrollment. Inheriting a Legacy of Freedom will target schools in need of improvement and address district-identified gaps in teachers' content knowledge and qualifications through a program of interrelated activities: 8-day summer academies that focus on document-based questioning strategies, school and district-level Professional Learning Communities that meet throughout the grant period, technology-based learning that includes monthly book study sessions and podcasts of historians' lectures, and action research that encourages participants to examine their teaching practices. Four separate cohorts of 35 teachers will receive professional development, and lead teachers will be chosen from these cohorts each year to coach other teachers of American history on topics such as meeting individual student needs and integrating technology into classroom practice. Lead teachers will also model effective teaching practices for American history teachers at schools in need of improvement. Inheriting a Legacy of Freedom will incorporate several overarching themes, including constitutional interpretation and American identity, culture, and religious development. The primary instructional strategy employed to convey content will be document-based questioning, which develops students' skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking. Teacher participants will create museum-like interactive exhibits, accompanied by curriculum support guides, for use by educators across the district.

Brevard County, Florida, is home to the Kennedy Space Center and a range of technology industries, yet the district has never made Adequate Yearly Progress. More than half of Title I schools are in improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, and few teachers have adequate history backgrounds. Becoming an American historians and scholars will support teachers as they research and discuss history during summer colloquia and workshops. Field experiences will immerse teachers in living history, and academy coaches (secondary teachers from a previous project) will mentor the participants. Early in their experiences, teachers will take online courses; by completion, they will be qualified to conduct such courses. Two groups of 40 elementary and middle school teachers will participate for three years (overlapping in Year 3), and selection criteria will favor teachers from schools with the greatest needs. The project theme is embedded in its name—Becoming an American: Continuity Through Change—and it will address the five turning points in American history named in the topics above. The project will focus on instructional strategies that include project-based learning, using technology and practicing differentiated instruction. Teachers will learn to identify historical patterns, establish cause-and-effect relationships, find value statements, establish significance, apply historical knowledge, weigh evidence to draw conclusions, and make defensible generalizations. The project's continuing impact on history teaching will come from its products, including a quasi-experimental study measuring student gains, teacher-created lessons on the project Web portal, classroom instruction that incorporates online lessons or virtual visits, mentoring of other history teachers in the district, and a teacher-designed standards-based student history assessment.

The 12 central Connecticut districts in American Voices cover rural, urban, and suburban areas, and include the state capital of Hartford. Many students in the region come from families where English is not the primary language. Voices will address both history and literacy by connecting teachers to members of the university history department and the education school's reading and language arts faculty. Each year, teachers will meet regularly in a study group where they will discuss readings with historians, identify materials to use with students, compare and assess classroom materials and strategies, and select topics for the summer institute. During the week-long institute, teachers will meet with scholars, visit museums, and develop artifact kits and classroom materials, including "historical scene investigations," to engage students. Voices will explore the theme of Community, Conflict, and Compromise to deepen knowledge about American history from colonization to the Civil War. Instructional strategies will emphasize integrating history with literacy, creating Web-based lessons and resources, and encouraging active learning through student investigations with primary sources. Content will introduce primary source materials and other resources related to local and national people and events in history. The classroom-ready lessons and historical investigation units created by Voices teachers will be available to the public on the project’s Web site.

Grant partner Yale University currently manages another TAH grant for middle and high school teachers. Building on this experience, this grant will serve the elementary teachers in the urban and urban fringe districts in south central Connecticut. Here, several schools are in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, and large achievement gaps are not uncommon. Each year, participating teachers will be engaged in developing curriculum units to share with other teachers and post on the project Web site. Other annual activities will include a summer institute/field trip and eight seminars provided by noted historians who will organize lectures around concepts, themes, and primary sources that underlie the development of American liberty. Project leaders estimate that about 65 teachers a year will participate in selected activities. Because participants will determine their own level of engagement, staff expects 35 teachers each year will attend at least 75 percent of activities, and the goal is that these will be the participants recruited from the schools with the greatest needs. With Liberty and Justice for All aims to help students be engaged with the story of our nation and contribute to the ongoing story of American liberty. To support greater student engagement, grant activities will include instruction that helps teachers apply high-quality curriculum, critical thinking, close reading, and collaborative leadership skills. Outside the seminar settings, this will be accomplished through school-based coaching and technology training. The project will increase the quality and quantity of instructional resources available to all teachers and build an online collection of instructional units for all teachers to use.

This California district is in its first year of improvement and several of its schools have not made Adequate Yearly Progress for two or more years. The number of English Language Learners has been increasing steadily in recent years. Igniting Freedom's Flame: Lesson Studies in Teaching American History (Igniting Freedom's Flame) will present an annual program of four supper seminars, eight Professional Learning Communities meetings, and summer field studies at a national historic site. Each year, 24 teachers will participate and be encouraged to continue for multiple years. Recruiting teachers from all three grades in each cohort will help participants see their content within a broader context. Project leaders will also recruit school administrators to build systemic support for history professional development. This aligns with the theme of seeing history as a literate discipline that depends on and fosters close reading, critical thinking, and clear writing—skills that support students across the curriculum. Historians will discuss both content and process standards to help teachers understand discipline-specific thinking. Teacher-leaders will model lessons that use primary sources and disciplinary thinking. The robust Professional Learning Community component will create groups of four same-grade teachers, one historian, and one or two teacher-leaders. These small groups will use Lesson Study to examine student work, develop and observe lessons, and critique and refine the lessons. Practice with differentiating instruction will be incorporated into this work. Igniting Freedom's Flame will produce a collection of tested history lessons and a cadre of teachers who can collaborate with their colleagues to improve history instruction.

Sacramento City, an urban district with a diverse population, has 31 low-performing schools. Across the district, history gets an average of 12 instructional minutes per day, and only 35 percent of 8th graders and 33 percent of 11th graders achieve at proficient or better on the state's American history test. Legacies of Liberty will present 50 hours of annual professional development in four supper seminars, three history labs, Lesson Study sessions, and a research visit to a historical site. Based on a recruitment plan shaped by state standards and school needs, the first cohort will include 30 elementary and middle teachers who will be encouraged to complete Years 1-3; Years 4-5 will focus on high school content. As teachers work toward maximizing the instructional potential of time devoted to history, they will get support in supper seminars delivered by academic historians and teacher-leaders who will review state standards, present content on a topic included in the standards, then distribute and discuss lesson plans focused on that topic. The sessions will also model how historians use primary and secondary sources in teaching and research. History labs will explore practical ways to bring content and the discipline of history into the classroom, and Lesson Study sessions will help teachers better understand how to craft a lesson as they work in groups to create new instructional units. The learning from these settings will be augmented by authentic research during the summer field experience. Legacies of Liberty teachers will develop a collection of standards-based, tested instructional units for use by all history teachers.

New Heights Charter School and four other schools in the K-8 Charter Consortium, including two that have not achieved Adequate Yearly Progress for 3 years, serve more than 1,500 students in Los Angeles. Understanding American History will guide history teachers in these schools through activities that increase their pedagogical content knowledge, including after-school seminars and museum visits. Teachers will also pilot lessons and units of study in teacher cohort classrooms and use the Tuning Protocol to reflect on the units and refine them in grade-level teams. Recruitment of participants will focus on teachers with multiple subject credentials who teach American history content; 30 teachers will participate (starting with 24 in Year 1, with three more added in Year 2 and another three in Year 3). Teachers will explore significant turning points in American history and the role of individuals as viewed through the lens of core principles set forth in the nation's founding documents that have shaped America's social, political, and legal institutions. Teachers will employ the instructional strategies outlined by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in Understanding by Design as they design units of study that address "enduring understandings" in American history. Teachers will design 25 American history units of study that motivate students and support English language learning; share what they learn with members of the California Charter Schools Association; and make exemplary units and support materials available online to the larger teaching community.

This suburban district, east of San Francisco and Oakland, has high percentages of schools not meeting Adequate Yearly Progress standards. Nearly 20 percent of students are English Language Learners, and state history-social science test results show 30 percent of 8th grade students and 28 percent of 11th grade students scoring below basic. Each year, American Democracy in Word and Deed will have professional historians, scholars, and educators lead four 2-hour afterschool colloquia, a weeklong summer institute and four daylong colloquia. Activities will include discussions, lectures, and opportunities to develop, teach, evaluate, and revise a lesson each year. Two cohorts, each with 25 teachers from Grades 4 and 5 (early American history) and 25 teachers from grades 8 and 11 (19th- and 20th-century American history), will participate for either two or three years. The project's theme will focus on the words and deeds that gave birth to, nurtured, and tested democracy in American history. Teacher interaction and engagement with content experts will be aimed at helping teachers develop enthusiasm, creativity, and confidence around content knowledge, historical thinking skills, and discipline-specific approaches to reading and writing. The practice of Lesson Study will help teachers become more collaborative, reflective, and effective in their classroom instruction. Each year, every teacher will create and refine a lesson, so the project will produce a collection of activities to share with history district-wide teachers.

Fresno County, in the San Joaquin Valley halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, includes many rural areas where teachers have few professional development opportunities and students come from a variety of cultural backgrounds. The region's students tend to score below average on the state history test. Reflecting on Our Past offers three components: (1) the Teaching American History certificate program, which will offer teachers opportunities for advanced study to earn a certificate; (2) the colloquium series, with six 2-day events each year that cover both content and pedagogy; and (3) the summer travel study and curriculum history institute, a 5-day, content-driven, scholar-guided event. These components are designed to different levels of complexity, and the colloquia and summer institutes will be organized around each year's topic area. The 50 teachers who participate in the year-long colloquium series will be recruited from the appropriate grade level and from schools with the greatest needs. During the grant period, two cohorts of 15 teachers (30 total) will complete the 2-year certification for teaching American history. The summer travel study and curriculum institute will accommodate 50 teachers, who will be drawn from both groups. Reflecting on Our Past aims to restore American history teaching and learning to the elementary classroom. Teachers will learn about integrating language arts and history instruction, so both receive the classroom time they deserve. Teachers, and then their students, will be able to comprehend and analyze expository history texts, use primary sources, and apply historical thinking skills. The project will produce a cadre of teachers who can assist their colleagues.