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.

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.

Telling America's Story will target 24 Title I schools in need of improvement within Community School Districts 8, 11, and 12 in the Bronx, where student performance has been extremely poor on New York's standardized history assessments and more than a fourth of all teachers are teaching without valid certification or outside of their subject certifications. Participating teachers from these schools will engage in the following professional development activities each year: eight full-day Saturday workshops featuring content lectures and pedagogy sessions at various museums and historic sites, four workshops on American film, four lectures by professional historians, two monthly school-based study group/peer coaching meetings, and a culminating 4-day summer institute on creating curriculum. Teachers will also receive free passes to 30 local museums and laptops for networking and curriculum development. A new cohort of 25 teachers will participate each year. Those teachers who "graduate" will then become teacher-historians who facilitate on-site project activities within their schools. The thematic focus will be on how historical events and times have shaped America's current and past social, political, and economic values, especially as viewed through the lens of New York City. Teachers will learn to stimulate historical thinking and analysis as they integrate traditional media (film, television, radio, and literature) and interactive literacy techniques such as blogs into the delivery of American history content, making history accessible to all, including poor readers and nonreaders within their classrooms. Classroom-ready media, presentations, and lessons created during Telling America's Story will be disseminated via a program Web site.

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.

The eight charter schools participating in this grant are in the Bronx, New York. Nearly 100 percent of their students are ethnic minorities, and program activities will reflect a multicultural perspective. Each year, the professional development program will include eight 3-hour sessions during the school year, 6 hours of classroom modeling, four 5-hour summer sessions, and a variety of Web-based activities. Because elementary and middle school teachers are least likely to have formal history preparation, they will be the target audience for grant activities. Each year a new group of teachers will enter the project. Beginning in Year 2, 10 teachers from the previous year will stay on for two additional years and some of these will evolve into trainers. The underlying theme of collaboration and learning community is designed to build a network that the participating schools can use to sustain the project's impact. Fundamentals of American History will focus on early American history (1600s-1860s) to meet needs identified by teachers. Content spiraling will ensure that vital subject areas are revisited each year as new teachers enter the program. Instructional strategies will include building history skill sets, reviewing student work and conducting ongoing assessment, using peer support and self-reflection (both face-to-face and online), conducting historical research, and employing multimedia and Web-based activities. The project will produce a cadre of well-prepared history teachers who can support their colleagues and strengthen American history teaching and learning.

Woodbury City Public Schools is an urban district in southern New Jersey near the site of the Battle of Red Bank during the Revolutionary War. About half of the students are from minority backgrounds, and the number of Latino students is growing. The district's history teachers have had few opportunities for professional development. History specialists will lead eight days of training a year, including two 2-day colloquia, two half days of research and review, and a 3-day summer institute. The project will also present 12 evening videoconferences that will be open to all district teachers. Each year, 40 teacher fellows will participate in activities designed in a turnkey train-the-trainer approach. The Battle of Red Bank project aims to help teachers, and thereby students, examine history through the lens of a historian. Teachers will study substantive content through researching political, economic, legal, and social events and issues in American history. They will look at contemporary and later historiographies, along with primary documents. Instructional strategies will include Binary Paideia and Understanding by Design. These strategies will be incorporated into teacher-designed lessons, which will also employ the American Institute for History Education's Talking History network, 12-step process for student research, and frameworks and strategies. Classroom observations and coaching will help teachers refine their lessons so they can be used by other teachers. Online resources provided through CICERO, a Web-based history resource, will be available to fellows and all district teachers. The project will develop a cadre of trainers to deliver turnkey replication of project activities, and a collection of lesson units that use innovative classroom strategies.

This northern New Jersey consortium has more than 157 schools in need of improvement. More than 28 percent of students are classified as disabled and many teachers are not highly qualified to teach American history. Coaching staff—historians and educators—will deliver 111 hours of training, plus eight hours aimed at helping nonparticipants implement curriculum created by participants. The project will offer three distinct 2-year programs, each designed to serve specific grade levels. Each year, each district will have five 2-hour afterschool workshops, one full-day training, a 35-hour summer institute, a regional event/conference to promote replication, on-site and online mentoring, and access to a Web site containing resources and other project products. Years 1 and 2 will involve 60 high school teachers; Years 2 and 3 will train 60 middle school teachers; and Years 4 and 5 will train 50 elementary teachers. The project theme is meeting the 21st Century challenge of helping the increasing numbers of immigrant, English as a Second Language, and disabled students reach proficiency in American history. The goal is systemic reform in a region where many districts have not updated their American history curricula for a decade. Teachers will practice such instructional strategies as historical inquiry skills, differentiated instruction, Understanding by Design, and literacy strategies that address the needs of struggling students. With an eye to replicating the project, leaders have a quasi-experimental design for pilot testing, evaluating and implementing 21st Century Teaching American History. They expect to end with a curriculum that organizes historical facts into big ideas, essential questions, and enduring understandings.

Led by the Miller R-II School District, a consortium of 14 rural Missouri school districts in need of improvement will address teachers' underpreparation in history education by implementing the Preserving America's Midwestern Heritage Fellowship. The fellowship program will offer 40 to 70 teachers of history in Grades 3-12 two professional development tracks. Those who choose Track 1 will attend at least six 3-hour content seminars that include content and instructional skills training in inquiry; they may also opt to attend a 5-day summer travel institute. Those in Track 2 will attend a 2-day fall colloquium, a 2-day spring colloquium, four and a half days of research and review, and a 5-day summer travel institute. Teachers in both tracks will attend Talking History Webinars, prepare standards-based units, lessons, and/or other lesson materials, and receive classroom coaching that employs the thereNow IRIS telepresence coaching system. Five participants will become lead teachers and provide turnkey trainings for history teachers across the consortium. Each year, fellows will research and study the political, economic, legal, social and ideological contrasts found throughout American history. They will learn to use the Binary Paideia paradigm, the American Institute for History Education Signature Strategies, and the CICERO "digital toolbox" of resources to implement grade-appropriate, inquiry-based teaching in their classrooms. Fellows will create historical narratives and interactive lessons that will be shared on the fellowship Web site. In addition, they will create "traveling trunks" that will be available for check-out to teachers across the consortium.