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 Teachers will all study the same historical content, then learn grade-appropriate approaches to teaching it.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.

The New York City schools in this project qualify for Title I funding and have significant percentages of students with disabilities or limited English proficiency. Annual activities will include two online courses, monthly collegial groups, a 2-week summer institute, nine content and pedagogical workshops, historic site tours and peer coaching. During Year 4, all teachers will participate in a 2-week summer institute, and fourth grade teachers will participate in a history fair; in Year 5, all teachers will participate in full-day collegial meetings, and seventh grade teachers will participate in National History Day. Also in Year 5, teachers will visit other project schools to see how the activities are being implemented. An assistant principal from every school will participate to build capacity to coach teachers and to oversee implementation. The project will have three cohorts—assistant principals in Year 1, fourth grade teachers in Year 2 and seventh grade teachers in Year 3. This project will use music as a lens for teaching social studies with American history. Classroom strategies will focus on expanding pedagogical expertise in critical thinking skills as well as integrating music and video as primary sources. The Center for American Music will conduct summer institutes on using music in teaching. Online courses from the Foundation for Critical Thinking will teach theory and application of critical thinking skills, Gilder Lehrman workshops will help teachers create lesson plans, and tours and workshops from Brooklyn Navy Yard will help bring the historical content to life. The project Web site will house archives of student work and project-created, media-rich lesson plans that will be available to all teachers.

Sowing the Seeds of Freedom in the Rio Grande Valley will serve two southwestern New Mexico school districts with significant Hispanic, Mexican and Native American cultural influences; based on a 2010 needs assessment, a significant number of elementary and middle school teachers in these districts lack an adequate academic background in American history. Each year, 12 teachers will travel to Colonial Williamsburg to participate in a summer teacher institute. Other activities will include sponsoring additional colloquia and professional development workshops at museums and historic sites, establishing professional resource libraries at each school, and creating artifact bags that align with the historical content. The project will serve 30 teachers and five mentor teachers each year plus an additional 100 teachers each of the last three years through the Sowing the Seeds Conference. The professional development program will focus on major themes in American history based on the New Mexico Content Standards. The teachers will receive training in (1) using primary and secondary resources; (2) formulating questions through inquiry; (3) analyzing how historians use evidence/artifacts; (4) developing differing interpretations; (5) examining bias and points of view; (6) understanding historical debate/controversy; (7) examining how causation relates to continuity/change; (8) discovering interrelationships; and (9) learning that understanding of the past requires understanding of the assumptions and values of the past.

Located in southwestern Missouri, the participating districts—mainly small, rural and disadvantaged—have all been targeted for improvement. Each fall and spring, the semester will begin with a 6-week online course that includes reading, analysis and dialogue. This will be followed by a weekend seminar that combines lectures with discussions of readings and teaching strategies; lectures will be open to the public and to all teachers as in-service professional development. The year will conclude with a 5-day summer institute, during which teachers will visit historic sites and use primary sources to conduct research and prepare instructional materials. Each year, 30 elementary and secondary teachers will participate; they will work in cadres of three to five to prepare lesson materials, observe one another presenting the materials, and analyze lesson delivery and content along with associated student work. Through looking at decisive moments in American history, teachers and students will explore "who we are" as a nation and "why we are the way we are." Traveling America's Cs is designed to address identified gaps in teachers' knowledge. The project will introduce historical thinking skills; the revised Bloom's taxonomy; 21st century skills and research-based strategies, such as inquiry-based teaching, that help students take charge of their learning. Lessons will be reviewed by students to help teachers refine them for interest and effectiveness. Products will include electronic teacher portfolios, lessons, assessments, resources and ideas, and traveling trunks that will be available to all teachers in a 48-district consortium.

In Mississippi schools, students do not learn about post-1877 U.S. history prior to the 11th grade, and few teachers know about or teach the important role Mississippi played in major events like the Civil War, Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. In this project, nationally known and local historians will lead teachers in 2-week summer institutes. Teachers also will attend four workshops each semester and meet once per week (online or in person) to engage in critical dialogue around content and pedagogical understandings and challenges. The project will involve two cohorts of 25 teachers (Years 1-2 and Years 3-4). In Year 5, five new teachers will join 20 teachers from the first two cohorts. Teachers from area districts also can attend open workshops. The content will increase teachers' knowledge of significant turning points in U.S. history and how these events have reflected, influenced or contradicted principles of freedom and democracy. The teachers will explore how the project themes connect with Mississippi history. In addition to broadening their content knowledge, teachers will engage in hands-on classroom activities to improve historical inquiry, critical thinking, cross-curricular connections and reflective practice. The strategies will be built around school-based inquiry, continuous improvement and critical dialogue. Teachers will work in professional learning communities to examine content critically and to evaluate their lesson plans, pedagogy and student work in the light of authentic assessments. A Web site will host teacher-developed products, including field-tested primary source activities and lesson plans.

A needs assessment of these 16 districts in the greater Boston area indicates that the teachers are interested in taking graduate-level courses and working with the museum and higher education partners involved in this project. Each year, a new cohort of 35 teachers will participate in a week-long summer institute with full-day workshops at the partner sites; immersion experiences at places like Gettysburg, Antietam and Washington, D.C.; training to incorporate technology nto history instruction; the Using Primary Source for Critical Thinking and Understanding course; graduate-level colloquia; and online professional development courses. In addition to the five 35-teacher cohorts, 100 new teachers per year will attend graduate courses—taught by Suffolk University faculty—to develop core content knowledge in American history and historical thinking skills. The overarching project focus is to examine how America's founding documents have defined freedom and democracy and to trace these ideals and the lived realities for different groups of Americans over 300 years. The content will explore the evolving struggle for human rights and justice, emphasizing the essential framework of American democracy, 19th-century social movements that challenged constitutional guarantees of freedom, the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction with regard to these freedoms, and 20th-century challenges to human rights at home and abroad, including the civil rights movement. The teachers will work together in district-based teams and develop Web-based teaching resources. At the conclusion of the coursework, participant teams will create a comprehensive unit that will be disseminated across the consortium districts and beyond.

This district—the largest in Maryland—includes more than 1,000 American history teachers, many of whom have little or no background in their subject matter or in specific strategies for teaching history and historical thinking skills. Each year, the project activities will feature a 1-week summer institute for separate cohorts of 20 elementary teachers. A 2-week summer institute, beginning in Year 2, will serve annual cohorts of 30 secondary school teachers. In addition, all teachers in the district can participate in six annual events during the school year: four content-based visits to historic sites in the Washington, D.C., area, and two skill and application workshops that integrate technology and reflective practice. Teachers who have participated in 1 year of the project will be allowed to return for a second year. Returning teachers will attend more advanced workshops on historical thinking skills and share what they have learned through presentations at their schools, meetings or state or national conferences. The project strategies will focus on historical thinking skills (such as close reading, assessing reliability and sourcing) and include practice with online resources and primary sources, biographies, autobiographies and other historical narratives. Returning teachers who demonstrate refined skills will be filmed in their classrooms, and the videos will be used in discussions regarding best practices. The Center for History and New Media will develop an open-source, open-access Web site to share project materials, including primary source activities, the classroom videos of teachers, podcasts of site visits and workshops, and workshop materials, such as bibliographies, teaching strategies and recommended Web sites.