In these New York state districts, teachers have minimal American history training and limited access to content-specific training or professional experiences. During each school year, monthly seminars will incorporate recent scholarship and historical thinking skills. These meetings will be supplemented by online book chats using the project's Blackboard site. After completing the 10 seminars, teachers will attend a 5-day summer institute and learn to integrate newly learned content as well as develop tools to evaluate existing teaching materials and student work. By attending the summer institute, teachers will earn three graduate credits from the State University of New York College at Cortland. They also will participate in hands-on field experiences and in a teaching fellows program. Each year, the project will organize four content teams of six teachers, paired with a project historian and master teacher. These teams will develop content-specific curriculum units using the Understanding by Design framework. The project content will emphasize the impact of the nation's foundational documents and events on the lives of ordinary Americans. Highlighting these individual stories will help teachers appreciate the ways Americans have experienced significant turning points in history. Historians will share significant primary sources, identify valuable online archives, and model analysis and interpretation of the materials. The project also will help teachers engage students in critical analysis and higher level thinking. The products will include unit-level teaching materials, a project that superimposes the curriculum onto a U.S. map, and other teacher-created resources, such as the team-developed curriculum units, which will be reviewed for historical accuracy and field-tested to ensure alignment with learning objectives.

This large district represents a diverse cross section of students and faculty across New York City. Each year of the project, up to 32 teachers (some continuing for more than 1 year) will participate in (1) a 3-day staff development workshop, which will demonstrate effective methods for teaching American history through historic sites in Philadelphia, New York City and elsewhere in New York state; (2) two 3-hour summer and two 3-hour Saturday workshops, in which teachers will practice using multimedia equipment at the new DiMenna Children's History Museum; and (3) a 3-day summer and a 3-day Saturday workshop to help middle and high school teachers convey the proper historiography skills to prepare their students for participation in National History Day. In addition to the outlined topics and historic site visits, the participants will receive guided tours of these New York Historical Society temporary exhibits: "Life for a Child: Insulin"; "John Rogers: American Stories"; "Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York"; and "New York in World War II." The project will focus on using multimedia and news broadcasting to disseminate facts about historic events, conducting extensive research via public and museum library resources, and engaging students in debates on historical topics and time periods. The strategies will include historical instructional methodologies, differentiated instruction tied to content, and flexible approaches to address various student needs, such as using picture symbols to facilitate communication. Project products will be shared online; these will include lesson plans, alternative assessments, student portfolios and video productions of students and staff.

A Teaching American History initiative was implemented in three of these low-income East Bronx districts beginning in 2003. This new project builds on this earlier grant's success by extending the program to all teachers and schools in the Bronx. Each year, teachers will attend a 2-week summer institute, featuring a morning seminar with a nationally known historian; presentations by educators from the partner organizations; a study of how historical art and artifacts can illuminate content, including curatorial lectures, gallery walks and tours of exhibits and collections; and a history media training workshop. During the school year, teachers will participate in walking tours of New York City, lectures and film study groups. Five cohorts of 25 teachers will receive one year of intensive training in U.S. history content knowledge and aligned pedagogical skills that integrate historical art, artifacts and media into the classroom. Hundreds of other U.S. history teachers also may participate in ancillary program activities. In-depth case studies of New York City history will offer a lens for viewing national events and themes across U.S. history. Teachers will translate their knowledge and skills into original content-rich materials and improved practices. Collaboration through peer networks will help teachers share and develop common strategies for instructing all students. Once teachers complete the program, they will become teacher historians, continuing to develop their content knowledge and supporting other teachers. The participants will develop classroom materials, including lesson plans, activities using media, History in a Box artifacts and documents, and curriculum units.

This New York City consortium involves schools in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn that serve ethnically diverse and predominately inner-city, low-income students—72 percent qualify for reduced-price meals, and 14 percent receive special education courses. Only 75 percent of the consortium's schools are meeting Adequate Yearly Progress goals. The project will feature rigorous coursework, methods instruction, monthly reviews of student achievement and classroom practices, and classroom observations and lesson modeling. Each year, the project activities will include (1) nine full-day in-service training sessions at Columbia University, St. John's University and historic sites, featuring content lectures and guidance on pedagogy training, technology integration, differentiated instruction and student evaluation and instruction; (2) two after-school meetings per month, focusing on the preparation of pretests and posttests and content-related teaching materials; and (3) a summer institute to review earlier training materials and develop lesson plans and classroom-ready resources. Each cohort of 50 teachers will receive one year of professional development; the following year, this cohort will continue to attend monthly meetings, give pretests and posttests to students, and provide support to the next cohort. Each year, the project teachers will read eight books and numerous articles and learn to apply primary sources, artifacts, first-hand accounts, illustrations and site visits to classroom practice. Teacher-developed materials will be posted on two Web sites that reach local, statewide and national audiences.

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.

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.