The three rural California counties involved in this project often combine resources to provide teacher professional development, and this project will build teachers' content knowledge and help them learn to think like historians. Annual activities will include two symposia, during which historians and teachers will explore content, primary sources and lesson study practices. Four live, online seminars will bring scholars and teachers together to discuss historical questions. With support from content experts, teams of like-grade teachers will use lesson study to develop lessons based on the content. The year will end with a summer field study that augments the scholarly studies, and the next year will begin with a late-summer institute focused on scholarship and pedagogy. Each year, 35 teachers will participate, and increasing stipends will encourage multiple years of training. Years 1 to 3 will address eras taught by secondary teachers, and Years 4 and 5 will present content tied to elementary standards, but teachers will be welcome to join as openings are available. Working with teachers of different levels will encourage thinking about cross-grade connections. Teachers will explore California's gateways to the national narrative during field visits to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Historians and scholars will introduce historical thinking skills, such as deconstructing primary sources, and will help teachers see unifying themes in the state's history standards. The project model of blended in-person and online activities is designed to ensure advance preparation and active participation, while directing the focus to improved teaching practice; ongoing formative assessment will help project leaders adjust activities if necessary.

Located in southeastern California, these districts serve a population that is more than half Hispanic. Nearly one-fourth of students are English language learners, 60 percent qualify for reduced-price meals and nine percent receive special education services. Each year, teachers will participate in nine full-day workshops, six evening book discussions, lesson study training sessions and field study at a local historic site. They will have two summer institute opportunities: (1) 20 teachers will attend a 5-day trip to historic sites; and (2) all teachers can apply to attend a workshop sponsored by an external provider, such as Gilder Lehrman or the National Endowment for the Humanities, and have their costs covered. In addition, networking and discussions will be supported by an online professional learning community. Two separate cohorts of 75 teachers (25 from each grade) will participate in an intensive 2-year program. From each cohort, 30 will be selected to receive another year of history coaching training; these 60 content leaders will provide on-site support to colleagues to sustain the project's impact. Training from historians and education specialists will deepen content knowledge and content-related teaching skills (e.g., using primary sources, thinking maps, source analysis, historiography). In addition, teachers will learn to develop digital documentaries and use student assessment data to guide instruction. This combination of skills and knowledge will enhance capacity to think like historians and to teach American history in engaging, interactive ways. Best practices, lessons and materials will be shared through conference presentations and on three Web sites to reach local, state and national teacher audiences.

Due to the emphasis on language arts and mathematics, this California district has not had a professional development program for history teachers in more than a decade. Each year of the project, teachers will participate in (1) a 7-day institute on content and differentiated instruction; (2) 10 after-school or Saturday learning meetings, including four quarterly reading groups; (3) extended learning opportunities through four professional learning community meetings; (4) field study trips; (5) content/pedagogy mentoring and demonstration lessons to address diverse student needs; (6) a week-long summer institute; and (7) expanded learning through technology. Thirty teachers will have the option of participating in a master's degree program. In addition, two facilitators and 24 teachers who have completed 85 percent of the required hours will be eligible for a week-long study trip to Philadelphia, Gettysburg and Washington, D.C. In the first three years, the project will offer grade-level professional development on history and pedagogy to three cohorts of U.S. history teachers: 50 elementary, 30 intermediate and 30 high school. In Years 4 and 5, the project will provide 4-day institutes to support continued learning. Through the Professional Learning Communities, the teachers and mentors will review student performance data with a data-analysis model from Response to Intervention. They also will review state standards and the district pacing guide, and create pretests and posttests for the next study unit. The teachers will collaboratively develop curricula with a special focus on document-based writing lessons.

This project will focus on schools that serve continuation, correctional and alternative education students, who tend to be high need and low performing; many in this area south of Los Angeles come from families in poverty. Because teachers at these schools often teach more than one subject, they may lack deep content knowledge and want to learn more about American history. University faculty will provide expertise in content and historical methodologies, and K-12 teachers will lead training in pedagogy at the kick-off institutes and monthly follow-up sessions. Participating project teachers will work together to create a standards-aligned curriculum. The project will include a strong strand of developing teacher leadership and building learning communities. In Year 1, the main cohort will have 24 teachers divided into 12 teams to develop curriculum. These teachers will be joined by 12 additional teachers in each successive year, so each team will have four members during the final year of the project. At the end of each year, a separate cohort of 10 teachers will customize the curriculum developed by the main cohort so it can be used for independent study. The project's underlying theme will be emphasizing the history of American citizenship to develop students' critical thinking and academic literacy and to prepare them to participate in a democratic society. The project will employ lesson study as its main curriculum development and instructional tool, and project leaders will support the process through coaching and mentoring. Lesson plans and other materials will be available on the project's Web site.

A needs assessment determined that most history teachers in these California districts lack basic knowledge of U.S. history. They also need strategies and tools to help them make the content relevant and compelling for students. Each year, this project will offer four content seminars, three book-study discussion sessions, a 3-day summer institute and a year-end culminating event featuring a distinguished historian. Annual field study experiences will include "doing history" in Los Angeles, Tidewater Virginia through the Revolutionary War, Illinois and Missouri from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, industrial change in New England, and civil rights in the South. Annually, 40 teachers will attend at least 75 percent of the activities and have the option of participating in multiple years. New participants will be recruited to replace teachers who do not continue. The project will explore traditional American history from multiple viewpoints, placing visual art, music and literature in a historical context to add dimension and diverse perspectives. The content of each project year will lead the teachers on a voyage of discovery, where they will use primary sources, become acquainted with well-known historical figures, and gain insights into the development and evolution of the meanings of freedom and "a more perfect union." They will learn to place key events in time, name and analyze founding documents, recognize themes and key concepts in their curricula, demonstrate and teach historical thinking skills, and generally display a more profound level of historical literacy. Many project products will be available on the Web, including teacher-created model lessons, training materials and evaluation tools.

In this district—the nation's second largest—nearly three-fourths of the students qualify for reduced-price meals, and nearly one-third are English language learners. Most of the targeted schools are not meeting adequate yearly progress goals, and none are meeting state performance goals in U.S. history. In addition, budget issues have limited the amount of professional development available for U.S. history teachers in underperforming schools. During the project, teachers will attend (1) nine day-long in-service workshops, featuring content lectures and training in differentiated instruction, student evaluation and the project's core content-related teaching practices; (2) two after-school meetings per month to prepare pretests and posttests for students and examine content and relevant materials; and (3) a 5-day summer institute to study content, review standards, and develop lesson plans and classroom-ready resources and materials. The project staff will visit each teacher’s class four times per year to observe, model lessons, share new materials and provide support. The project will provide more than 250 hours of instruction to nine cohorts of 35 teachers —three fifth grade cohorts (Years 1 and 2), three eighth grade cohorts (Years 2 and 3) and three eleventh grade cohorts (Years 4 and 5). Over their two years of professional development, the project teachers will read at least 10 books and numerous articles as well as learn to use primary documents, artifacts, first-hand accounts, illustrations and site visits to translate content into classroom lessons. Best practices, lessons and materials will be posted online via three separate Web sites.

This large and diverse California district has a majority of students (70%) eligible for reduced-price meals, and many middle and high school history teachers work outside of their major fields. Each year, the project will offer six after-school seminars and a summer seminar, in addition to lesson study groups. An online professional development component—PD OnDemand—will begin during Year 2; learning sessions recorded during Year 1 will be available, as will teacher-created lessons from Year 1. Two tiers of professional development will be offered: Tier 1 will engage 75 teachers in a 3-year, 200-hour commitment; and Tier 2 will offer online access to events, guest speakers and products to all district history teachers. When the initial Tier 1 group concludes, recently hired teachers will be recruited for Years 4 and 5; some teachers who participated at the Tier 2 level earlier may also join this cadre. C.O.R.E. stands for content, organizations, reflective practice and experiences—the conceptual framework for this project. History content will be aligned with school level, so middle and high school teachers will study topics appropriate to their teaching assignments. Historian-led seminars will focus on key issues and events in American history, as well as ways to deliver instruction that supports higher level student thinking. Ongoing lesson study groups will be led by a specialist and will engage teachers in creating, teaching, observing, reflecting and refining as they develop classroom lessons. These lessons will become part of the PD OnDemand Web site, making classroom-validated resources widely available.

These southern California districts include low-performing schools with diverse student populations. History teachers in the district have expressed an interest in making constitutional heritage and democratic values more meaningful to students. Each year of the project, teachers will participate in seven days of professional development—including direct interaction with scholars who specialize in topics related to traditional constitutional and presidential history—and at least 16 additional hours of professional development to increase their content knowledge and capacity to provide effective instruction. The annual activities will include a 4-day content institute at a historical archive followed by four meetings using the Scholar Sessions model, which features a lecture/question-and-answer session, an academic reading and discussion session with a scholar, and a content application activity requiring the teachers to demonstrate their subject knowledge. Eighth-grade teachers will participate for all five years, while others will attend institutes specific to the subjects they teach. The project will explore four constitutional themes: governance, freedom of religion and expression, due process, and equality. Central themes will focus on the principles of freedom and democracy articulated in the founding documents and historic cases and controversies of the U.S. Supreme Court. Strategies will include building infrastructure through collaborative groups to make U.S. history a high priority in the districts; creating an open education resource Web site; and providing an experimental evaluation to gauge the project's impact on teacher content knowledge, historical thinking skills and capacity to provide effective instruction. Participants will make presentations about the project at national and local forums and submit journal articles for publication.

Very few teachers in the Burbank and Glendale, California, districts have history degrees, and history professional development has been hard to get. Also, 64 different languages are spoken in these schools, adding another challenge for teachers whose students have little understanding of the nation’s history. Annual activities will include five after-school workshops, a summer institute or workshop, a spring break or summer field trip, 10 hours of one-on-one lesson development and coaching support, and visits to local museum and archive resources.

Cohorts of 25 teachers will participate each year, based on content appropriate to their grade level, with an additional 20 teachers per year having access to workshops and summer institutes. The participants will explore historical turning points, key individuals and founding documents through four interconnected themes: the setting, the stories of the people, the government policies and Western influence on the nation as a whole. Teachers will learn research techniques, use of primary source documents, lesson development and evaluation. Their visits to local and distant sites will help teachers better understand the content they teach. Participants will develop rigorous, standards-based lesson plans to be disseminated through presentations at professional conferences and at special professional development events sponsored by the project. In addition, the project Web site will house model lesson plans, recorded lectures and presentations, and other resources for content and pedagogy.

Although the county's 18 districts vary in many ways, all have marked socioeconomic, ethnic and linguistic diversity, and some have large achievement gaps. This project builds on two previous Teaching American History projects to expand the community of highly qualified history teachers in the Berkeley, Calif., area. In addition to scholars, historians and instructional specialists, 10 teachers from a previous project will become mentor-leaders and will help to lead events that will include quarterly release day sessions, after-school workshops, weeklong summer institutes, online discussions and lesson study groups. The cadre of 30 teachers will be selected first from the three partnering districts; if slots remain available, teachers from other districts will be welcome to apply for the 3-year program. An additional 60 teachers will be recruited to participate in a "Meet the Scholars" lecture series. The theme of this project is "Re-Seeing American History: Freedom, Equality and Democracy Reconsidered." Project content will focus on interconnections between national rebuilding and social justice movements. Lesson study will be the mainstay of the instructional approach; as teachers are exposed to advanced scholarship around political, economic and sociocultural developments in the nation’s history, they will create, implement and analyze lessons centered on primary sources. This work will be supported by online discussions in a private area of the project Web site; the public area of the site will provide open access to lesson plans, videos and other products. Participants will also be involved in preparing proposals for conference presentations and articles for professional publications.