Teachers in eight southeastern New York districts have expressed interest in this project, and its topics were based on teacher-identified priorities. A typical year's activities will include a kickoff session, two after-school sessions, two 3-hour Saturday sessions, two full days of content learning, one or more online sessions and a full-day field trip to a local historic site. During the summer, teachers will attend a 5-day institute with content workshops, visits to historic locations and exploration of primary source documents and instructional strategies. Teachers will participate in one of three tiers: Tier 1 (50 teachers) will constitute the core group, committing to full participation and to mentoring other tiers; Tier 2 (50 teachers) will join in Years 2 and 3, attending many but not all activities; and Tier 3 (up to 100 teachers) will have access to Web tools training and to some other events. Rather than treating history as a set of facts, this project will address historical themes and questions that tell us who we are as Americans and how we got this way. Strategies such as document-based questioning and using primary source documents will support this approach. Teachers will focus on incorporating 21st-century technologies and skills into their practice; to this end, and to limit time away from the classroom, the project will employ both in-person and online activities. The online platform will support conferencing and social networking tools, providing the added benefit of helping teachers build a learning community. The Tier 1 teachers will produce unit plans that will be available on a regional Web site.

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 project will serve schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where more than half the 8th-grade students failed the Intermediate Social Studies Test and nearly one-third of eleventh grade students failed the U.S. History and Government Regents Examination, which is required for graduation. For each of the first two years of the project, a cohort of 30 teachers will attend eight full-day workshops, a 5-day summer institute conducted by professional historians and four 2-hour history lectures by professional historians (open to all middle and high school U.S. history teachers in the district); the second cohort will follow this same pattern for Years 3 and 4. During Year 5, 30 teachers—selected from the two cohorts—will attend master American history workshops where they will work collaboratively to develop classroom materials based on the content. Participants will be chosen based on their educational experiences and backgrounds, their preparedness to teach U.S. history, and the levels of their students. The curriculum will demonstrate how history can be studied through the lives of the people who have shaped it; as such, biography will be an important element. The project strategies will include engaging students in hands-on history through oral history; curating museum exhibits in the classroom; encouraging student journalism as a means of exploring history; conducting mock trials and debates; accessing and using appropriate primary sources; integrating books, art and media into the classroom; using technology and Web resources effectively; accessing library and museum collections; and using maps. The products will include lesson plans, presentations, study units, classroom activities and modified primary documents.