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 Teachers will all study the same historical content, then learn grade-appropriate approaches to teaching it.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.

This project will serve diverse New York City schools, where only 38 percent of general education and eight percent of special education and English Language Learner (ELL) students pass 8th-grade U.S. history exams. Each year, the project will feature (1) eight day-long seminars, where historians introduce U.S. history topics using primary sources and the Thinking Like a Historian framework; (2) up to four half-day seminars at museums, demonstrating how to integrate art, material culture and local history resources into teaching; (3) guidance and support in developing and teaching classroom activities, including assistance in instructional design, classroom visits and online collaborative communities; and (4) pre- and post-project evaluation data and reviews of student work, which will help the teachers and districts improve instructional practice, teacher knowledge and student achievement. The project will involve two separate cohorts of 36 7th- and 8th-grade teachers who work with special education and ELL students. The first cohort will participate in Years 1-3; during Years 4-5, the second cohort will receive training in the topics from Years 1-2. The content is derived from the New York State core social studies curriculum, but organized topically to allow teachers to develop themes across U.S. history. The teachers will study major events and themes with leading historians as well as pedagogical designs that combine content with strategies for building general and special education students' historical understanding and skills. The project will videotape selected participants' teaching lessons and make these best practices available online. Primary source materials, podcasts by historians and teacher-created classroom activities also will be featured online.

Middle and high school students in this diverse, low-income Bronx district have traditionally scored poorly on the New York statewide U.S. History Regents exam; also, teachers have little access to history-related professional development. Each year, the project will involve 32 teacher leaders in a week-long summer institute in which they will share primary and secondary sources to develop curriculum units and field-test U.S. history lessons with summer school students. At the institute, they will form curriculum design teams and participate in 11 meetings throughout the year to discuss content aligned with the targeted National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) periods. A total of 75 teachers will attend lectures twice a year, and 100 teachers will participate in two history forums per year, featuring lectures, primary source work and sharing of curriculum design team units. The participants will rotate each year with some overlap of teachers. The content will be based on a key premise—participation in society as educated citizens and voters requires students to understand the development of our democratic institutions and ideas. The project will extend teachers' ability to use primary sources, Web tools and inquiry strategies. Participating teachers will work within curriculum design teams—comprising a team historian, a teacher educator and eight high school teachers—to develop two units per year that align with the NAEP U.S. history themes and periods. A Web site will host these units, which will include primary and secondary sources, teaching strategies, lesson plans, activities and high-quality assessments. They will also share these materials through 2-day professional development history forums.

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.

A large majority of history teachers in these New Jersey districts expressed interest in having professional development opportunities to interact with historical experts, enrich their content knowledge and integrate primary sources into classrooms. In this project, 45 middle and high school teachers will engage in a 5-year examination of the major ideas, people, events and developments in American history from a constitutional perspective. Each year, the focal point will be an 8-day summer seminar at Princeton University to address content and make teachers aware of the relatively recent emphasis on social history. An additional 3.5 days of after-school professional development will be conducted each year to focus on content, curriculum and pedagogy. At least 85 teachers will be recruited, with 45 selected randomly as the experimental group and approximately 40 constituting the control group. Content time periods were selected because of the dramatic and polarizing debates that decisively shaped American political and constitutional perspectives for succeeding generations. These historical developments demonstrate the evolution of freedom and democracy as well as constitutional norms and understandings. Attention will be given to developing pedagogical skills to guide teachers and their students in gathering, examining and organizing historical data to make historical explanations, with particular emphasis on historical writing. Participating teachers will receive New Jersey professional development credit hours and may also receive graduate credits from the College of Education at Ashland University in Ohio upon payment of tuition. The project Web site will feature video recordings of the scholarly lectures and examples of lesson plans and other materials developed by the teachers.

Based on a needs assessment, American history teachers in these New Jersey districts are dissatisfied with their lesson plans, particularly the lack of emphasis on primary sources. In this project, 45 middle and high school teachers will engage in a 5-year examination of the major ideas, people, events and developments in American history from a constitutional perspective. Each year, the focal point will be an 8-day summer seminar at Princeton University to address content and make teachers aware of the relatively recent emphasis on social history. An additional 3.5 days of after-school professional development will be conducted each year to focus on content, curriculum and pedagogy. At least 85 teachers will be recruited, with 45 selected randomly as the experimental group and approximately 40 constituting the control group. Content time periods were selected because of the dramatic and polarizing debates that decisively shaped American political and constitutional perspectives for succeeding generations. These historical developments demonstrate the evolution of freedom and democracy as well as constitutional norms and understandings. Attention will be given to developing pedagogical skills to guide teachers and their students in gathering, examining and organizing historical data to make historical explanations, with particular emphasis on historical writing. Participating teachers will receive New Jersey professional development credit hours and may also receive graduate credits from the College of Education at Ashland University in Ohio upon payment of tuition. The project Web site will feature video recordings of the scholar lectures and examples of lesson plans and other materials developed by the teachers.

Teachers in these New Jersey school districts recently expressed an interest in receiving more U.S. history professional development, interaction with historical experts and collaborative opportunities to develop new lesson plans and teaching strategies. In this project, 45 middle and high school teachers will engage in a 5-year examination of the major ideas, people, events and developments in American history from a constitutional perspective. Each year, the focal point will be an 8-day summer seminar at Princeton University to address content and make teachers aware of the relatively recent emphasis on social history. An additional 3.5 days of after-school professional development will be conducted each year to focus on content, curriculum and pedagogy. At least 85 teachers will be recruited, with 45 selected randomly as the experimental group and approximately 40 constituting the control group. Content time periods were selected because of the dramatic and polarizing debates that decisively shaped American political and constitutional perspectives for succeeding generations. These historical developments demonstrate the evolution of freedom and democracy as well as constitutional norms and understandings. Attention will be given to developing the pedagogical skills to guide teachers and their students in gathering, examining and organizing historical data to make historical explanations, with particular emphasis on historical writing. Participating teachers will receive New Jersey professional development credit hours and may also receive graduate credits from the College of Education at Ashland University in Ohio upon payment of tuition. The project Web site will feature video recordings of the scholarly lectures, examples of lesson plans and other materials developed by the teachers.