The Dallas Independent School District serves many students with limited English proficiency, a contributing factor to low history scores. In a recent year, just 54 percent of eighth graders and 68 percent of high school students passed the first-semester exams. Each year History Sparks will begin with a kick-off day during which teachers receive independent study materials, review student work, and participate in sessions delivered by historians and master history educators. Other activities will include Saturday seminars and summer institutes, supplemented by field trips to a local site in Year 3 and a national site in Year 4. A cohort of 50 teachers will be selected from the district's 24 low-performing middle and high schools. Any teachers who leave the program before the final year will be replaced, so the curriculum for each year will be self-contained. History Sparks will help teachers learn to deal with complex questions of historical thinking, form habits of mind for studying historical events, people, and issues, and make connections to contemporary events. Years 1-3 will feature separate strands for middle and high school teachers, each presenting broad, chronological surveys of historical eras. In Years 4 and 5, all teachers will join in deep exploration of selected content. The project will employ primary source documents, books, videos, and Web sites—each accompanied by study questions and bolstered by online discussions that include project leaders and university historians. Participants will leave the professional development with classroom teaching resources and lesson plans that align with state standards and the History Sparks blueprint for effective history teaching and learning.

Teaching American History: Tennessee's First Frontiers being implemented by a consortium of school districts (Carter, Hawkins, Sullivan, and Washington Counties and Elizabethton City Schools) in northeastern Tennessee. It targets low-performing middle and high schools and those with high numbers of students performing below the proficient level on Tennessee achievement tests for American history. Professional development activities will include (1) intensive individual recruitment, counseling, and mentoring by a coach, who will assist teachers in developing their own professional development plans; (2) two 2-day in-service mini-institutes per year, emphasizing history content; (3) eight 2- to 3-hour after-school pedagogy workshops each year; and (4) a 3-day summer public history field experience and three 1-day Saturday sessions that relate local historic sites to major themes in U.S. history. Teachers' professional development plans may include activities such as book studies, development of curriculum and/or document-based assessments, examination of student work, and use of data to inform instruction. The project will serve at least 15 eighth grade and 15 high school teachers per year, and a total of 57 teachers will each participate for at least 90 hours over the life of the grant. Traditional American history content will be viewed through the prism of the changing definition of liberty and freedom. Teachers will be trained to make individual and collective struggles for freedom "come alive" by analyzing primary source documents, placing them in a historical context, and integrating technologies into their teaching practice. A program Web site will feature standards-based materials developed by participating teachers and by local historians and graduate students.

Located in central South Carolina, Sumter County School District Two, Sumter School District 17, and Clarendon County School District Two have not achieved Adequate Yearly Progress for the past two years. U.S. history end-of-course test results show that student performance in history lags far behind performance in math and English language arts in the districts. To develop more knowledgeable history teachers in the districts' elementary, middle, and high schools and to improve student performance, yearly STEP activities for participating teachers will include a 5-day summer institute, a 6-day field study trip, a history educators' forum, and three workshop days featuring local historians. STEP also includes a mentoring component and a technology component. Thirty teachers will be invited to participate in STEP for at least two years and preferably throughout all five years of the project. STEP will provide firsthand encounters with historical places, archives, and ideas to enable teachers to "see, touch, and talk history" and connect local and national history for their students as they explore the role of economics and technological changes and their relationship to society, ideas, and the environment. Instructional strategies will integrate technology and best practices in teaching the content of traditional American history. Teachers will create quality lessons plans and materials that engage students in activities that require higher-level thinking. These lessons will be posted on the districts' Web sites.

Florence School Districts One to Five are located in northeastern South Carolina. All five districts are in restructuring, and 31 percent or more of students in each district scored below basic on the state social studies test in 2007. To help history teachers gain the content knowledge they want, RWS will offer online graduate-level courses on a traditional semester schedule and through intensive study in 2-week summer institutes. Participants will conduct online discussions about history teaching, attend mini-institutes on examining student work and assessment and, in Year 3, become mentors to nonparticipating teachers to help them improve their knowledge and instructional practices. One cohort of 50 teachers drawn from all school levels will complete the 5-year program. Each year, half will take the online course and the other half will participate in the intensive summer institute. RWS aims to develop teacher-historians through increasing participants' knowledge of significant events, principles, historical thinking, and special topics, and by encouraging the practices of collaboration, curriculum design, and reflection. The graduate-level courses will focus on the eras and topics of American history outlined in the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the state's social studies curriculum framework. Other activities will focus on curriculum and instruction designed to build literacy skills and to engage both teachers and students in American history content. The project will result in a collection of teacher-created, technology-driven instructional units to be shared locally and nationally through the RWS Web site, which will also offer teaching resources and links to a variety of primary documents.

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.

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.

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.