Aiken, Edgefield, and Saluda County Schools in South Carolina included 22 schools in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring at the time of the grant application. To address history teachers' limited access to professional development, Hearing Every Voice will involve teachers in content-rich professional development in American history. Annual activities will include a 3-day fall colloquium, a 2-day summer colloquium, regional historical site visits, a series of 1-day Hometown Heroes workshops that fit local stories into the larger tapestry of American history, and access to quality Web-based content and pedagogical resources via Cicero and Sojourner History. These activities will include intensive content lectures, primary source analysis, innovative pedagogical techniques, training in the use of Historical Habits of the Mind, and hands-on experiences in historical settings. Forty teachers will participate throughout the five years of the project and will be trained as master teachers and mentors for others in their districts. The project’s unifying theme is its focus on helping educators and students understand the interrelated nature and significance of group and individual voices, events, and deeds within the flow of history. Instructional strategies based on Historical Habits of Mind will help teachers and their students develop historical thinking skills and will integrate primary sources and technology. Teachers will create lesson kits that combine scholarly readings, classroom resources, and high-quality lesson plans. These will be made available online.

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.

The Path Through History (Path) districts occupy nearly 18,000 square miles in predominantly rural central Oregon, a region where many schools are isolated from cultural and historical resources and lack access to many professional development opportunities. Path will provide teachers in these districts with face-to-face and online professional development activities—workshops, lectures, field trips, Web courses and more—designed to bring historical resources to even the most remote locations. In some cases, teachers will travel to meeting sites; in others, project staff and teacher-leaders will make school visits for classroom observations and one-on-one coaching sessions. Each year, 30 teachers—preferably in school or grade-level teams—will be recruited from schools with the greatest needs. Five additional teachers who participated in a previous Teaching American History grant will be recruited to act as district teacher-leaders who can develop all teachers' skills and work with administrators to implement structural changes. Pat will apply five historical inquiry themes developed in the previous grant—the American Dream, the Growth of Democracy, Cultural Conflict, Expansion of Borders, and Technology and Change. Each year's content will align with the grade level(s) of the year's participants. Instructional approaches will include constructivist theory, standards-based teaching and learning, formative assessment, differentiated instruction, use of primary and online resources, and employing critical thinking skills. In addition to skilled teachers who can support their colleagues, the project will produce a research study on the project's effects on teacher and student knowledge, a Web site that includes constructivist, rigorous, and standards-based lesson plans, and ongoing Professional Learning Communities.

The mainly rural American History Rocks! Liberty Fellowship (Fellowship) districts in southwestern Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Panhandle have diverse populations that include Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic English Language Learners, and military families. In Grades 5, 8, and 11, more than half of the students are failing American history. Each year, Fellowship teachers will attend colloquia, field trips, research sessions, and summer institutes. Twelve evening videoconferences will also be available to participants and all other district teachers. Participants will comprise a core group of 35 fellows from schools most in need of improvement, plus five content specialists who will receive intensive training so they can begin delivering professional development to nonparticipants in Year 2. This theme of turnkey professional development will extend to all participants by the end of the project, when core group participants will train colleagues at their local schools and districts. Fellowship content will emphasize traditional history teaching by pursuing research, writing historical narratives, creating substantive lessons, and generating Web-based activities that align with state standards. Strategies will include a 12-step process for historical research developed by the American Institute for History Education. online professional development and other resources on CICERO, lesson planning through Understanding by Design, classroom-based coaching, peer review of lessons, and a variety of frameworks for organizing historical content for use with students. The Fellowship project will result in a cadre of 40 teachers who can deliver training to their peers and a published compilation of events, materials, and lessons on a multimedia project Web site.

Connecting to the Past will provide services to history teachers within the Tri-County Educational Service Center area in northeastern Ohio, which includes three districts in need of improvement and four other districts with at least one school classified as being at risk. For two years, fewer than half of the districts within the multidistrict consortium have met requisite state standards in social studies. To address teachers’ needs, each year-long program of professional development will consist of five content seminars that include technology training, two historic site visits, and a 5-day residential summer institute at The Ohio State University in Columbus. Three lead teachers will mentor participants, who will have access to camcorders and software they can use to create Web pages, documentaries, or other multimedia presentations related to historical site visits. Participants will also receive a supplemental materials allowance, stipends, and support for lesson development. A new cohort of 24 teachers will join the program each year. Connecting to the Past will help teachers create learning environments in which youth can develop a perspective on the nation’s past, relate it to the present and connect it to their futures. Instructional strategies will emphasize primary sources and will include a special focus on teaching with technology to reach a new generation with stories about the past. Lasting benefits will include a program Web site and a cadre of teachers who can provide professional development and mentoring for their colleagues.

Teaching American History in North Carolina was designed to align with corrective action plans in the Pender, New Brunswick, and New Hanover School Districts in southeastern North Carolina. The project will target the districts' lowest-performing schools and recruit teachers who have the fewest credentials in history. Five modes of professional development will be offered each year: a lecture series to kick off each year, an intensive series of content seminars hosted at local and regional historical sites and museums, week-long summer institutes that emphasize traditional themes in American history, history-specific pedagogy workshops that convey strategies for scaffolding reading and face-to-face and online participation in professional learning communities. Each year, up to 25 teachers of history in Grades 4-12 will join the project. Incentives will include a stipend that increases when teachers commit to multiple years of participation. Teaching American History in North Carolina will help these teachers tap into the rich history of the state, especially its Cape Fear region, so that they can help students make sense of history by understanding its local manifestations. Master teachers will support the implementation of content literacy strategies as teachers engage students in the process of historical inquiry. The program will result in increased capacity among regional historical institutions to cooperate with local teachers. In addition, curricula, lessons plans, content packets, lecture videos, and other visual media will be made available on a project Web site housed at the History Teaching Alliance at Cape Fear Community College.

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.

Project HISTORY includes eight districts in central New York, and each district has at least one school in need of improvement or corrective action. Scores on U.S. history and social studies tests have been declining across all school levels, and performance drops on the high-stakes 11th-grade test have been especially worrisome. This project will provide 150 hours of professional development to each participating teacher through seminars, summer and afterschool workshops, museum visits, and five release days during each school year. Two cadres of 30 elementary, middle, and high school teachers will participate for 30 months each and complete the same curriculum. Project HISTORY intends to help teachers master historical thinking skills and transfer those skills to students. To support this effort, seminar content and teacher-created WebQuest lessons will be aligned with state standards. Teachers will engage in technology-supported problem-based learning, historical role play, analysis of original historical documents, including works of art contemporary to important events, and exploration of local historical sites and resources. By the end of the project, teachers will have created a collection of technology-based lessons and planned actual and virtual field trips for students.

Through the American Dream program, the New York City Department of Education (the largest school district in the country) will engage American history teachers in the city's 461 struggling elementary and middle schools. Only 30 percent of the city's eighth graders passed the state's latest social studies assessment. American Dream will seek to reach all 461 schools, with every teacher invited to participate in one or more program layers. Up to 150 teachers will participate in an intensive teacher leadership program, 90 of whom will attend an inaugural conference in Year 1. In each subsequent year, these and additional teacher-leaders will complete 72 hours of leadership development training, original research, curriculum development, and vertical team planning projects, run an American history conference for 100 teachers from around the city, and establish and maintain school-based American history resource rooms. Rigorous, but less intensive, instruction will be offered to the rest of the schools' history teachers through the Becoming Historians lecture series (Year 1), a quarterly evening lecture series, a quarterly workshop series at historical houses, a quarterly book club, and a film club. Through the lens of the American Dream, the program will explore defining moments in American history, from the time before European colonization through modern times. Teacher-leaders will be trained to provide professional development on innovative, developmentally appropriate teaching strategies that integrate technology and develop students' research, analysis, and presentation skills. Successful strategies and curricular units developed through the program will be disseminated citywide. In addition, teacher leaders will maintain American history resource rooms in their schools.

Community School District 31 has joined with four other New York City school districts in Brooklyn and Staten Island with a significant immigrant population to implement History for All. Thirty-five percent of the districts' schools have been cited for intervention due to substandard academic achievement, and pass rates on U.S. history exams is particularly low for special education students (27 percent, compared to 63 percent for general education students). Teachers who teach special education students in self-contained and/or inclusive settings will receive 68 hours of professional development annually: four day-long seminars; a week-long summer institute, led by historians, during which teachers will develop classroom activities; and seven monthly after-school meetings during which participants can share experiences and pedagogical approaches and learn to integrate technology, assessment, and fiction and nonfiction. Classroom coaching from the project director will help teachers refine project-based activities. The program will recruit 50 teachers for Years 1-3 and 40 for Years 4-5. All will be trained to lead professional development for other teachers in their schools and districts, and 10 members of the first cohort will join the second cohort and act as lead teachers to support their turnkey training efforts. Historical content will emphasize how Americans of different eras have struggled with and shaped the meaning of democracy in the United States. Teachers will learn to integrate art and material culture into their teaching of history through the use of differentiated instruction and universal design. All participating teachers will become part of a professional development cadre and will distribute classroom-tested activities online.