The 42 districts in this consortium sit close to the southern tip of Lake Michigan, almost directly across the lake from Chicago. Twelve districts are high priority; that is, they have schools in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, and teachers from these schools will be recruited first. This project will bring together academic historians and museum curators to lead 10-day summer institutes that incorporate museum visits, experiences with artifacts and primary source documents, and modeling of curriculum and instruction. Activities will include six days of rigorous content instruction, two days of field study in Chicago, one and a half days split among local museum and archives visits, and a final half-day spent working on teacher projects. Two full-day extension sessions will be held in the fall. Each summer, 25 teachers will be recruited into a new cohort, and teachers who complete the activities will receive a stipend or three graduate credits. Content related to the three main topic areas will be linked with larger themes. Teachers will explore how these themes contributed to the development of freedom and democracy. In addition, participating teachers will learn to use data to identify student needs and adjust instruction accordingly. During the summer and fall sessions, each teacher will write a paper that presents a period-appropriate thesis and defend the thesis using historical inquiry. Teachers will convert their research into multimedia lessons/presentations supported by primary sources, literature, and artifacts, and these will be available for all teachers to use.

History Connected is being implemented through a consortium of nine school districts in southeastern Pennsylvania. Eighteen low-performing schools within the consortium will be given preference during recruitment. A variety of annual professional development activities will prepare participating teachers to deliver American history as a stand-alone course: six school-day seminars (five on connecting history content to state standards and one on technology integration); a pre-institute orientation day in June with an online component; a 5-day summer content institute; five 2-hour book discussion/study groups based on biographies, memoirs, and historical works related to the year's theme; an online Professional Learning Community; and a 3-hour after-school "sharing conference" in Years 2 and 3. Each teacher will also develop two work products such as book reviews, lesson plans, and multimedia presentations. At least one participant in each district will be designated as a teacher fellow. Fellows will provide leadership and support for improving history education within their districts. History Connected will serve 40 teachers annually (120 over the life of the grant). Some teachers may participate in a "part-time" track if they are unable to complete all project activities. Teachers will learn to draw connections across time and place to the enduring themes and issues of American history. Instructional strategies will incorporate differentiated instruction, technology, historical thinking skills, and research skills using primary source documents and cultural artifacts. Project evaluation reports, historical resources, teacher work products, and curricula and lesson plans that incorporate differentiated instruction will be published on the program Web site.

High-stakes tests, budget cuts, and underprepared teachers are impacting these Massachusetts districts, where neighborhoods range from middle class to working class to under-resourced. Some districts are classified as in need of improvement and have no funds for professional development. Some districts are culturally diverse, with about half their students born into a home where a language other than English is spoken. All the lowest performing districts will have teachers participating in A More Perfect Union, where annual activities will include four half-day workshops, extensive readings, and an 8-day summer seminar. Extra workshop sessions will support teachers in the two most at-risk districts. One group of 45 teachers from all school levels will be recruited to participate for the first three years, and they will be prepared to support their colleagues when their training is complete. Underlying the A More Perfect Union activities is a focus on the origins and evolution of America's fundamental political ideas, traditions, and constitutional institutions. Drawing on the philosophy of history and research on pedagogy, historians and master teachers will help participating teachers develop historical habits of mind and learn how to incorporate these habits into the worldview of students. In addition, master teachers will provide classroom support for implementing new practices and for creating new lesson plans. The creation of a project Web site that contains historical materials, essays on issues and events, lesson plans, and other teaching materials will help sustain the project's effects when the grant period is complete.

Four of the five Becoming America districts are on the urban rim of Boston, and the fifth is a suburban district. The four urban rim districts have large multicultural populations resulting from recent influxes of immigrants, and many schools are either not making Adequate Yearly Progress or are in corrective action or restructuring. The project will immerse teachers in activities that provide intensive history content and collaborations with historians and master teachers. Every year, 13 seminars and a summer institute, along with a collaborative Web space, will support teachers' learning. Each annual cohort of 25 teachers will be selected from the schools most in need of improvement, yielding a total of 125 teachers who benefit directly from the project. The theme of exploring the role of immigrants in American history during the country’s expansion will help teachers make content relevant to the students in their classrooms. Becoming America will emphasize instructional strategies that develop student inquiry through project-based learning. To support this approach, teachers will learn to incorporate the use of educational technology and primary sources (e.g., national documents, individual records), information from local and national historic archives and libraries, and resources such as museums and historic sites into their classroom instruction. Every Becoming America teacher will develop and implement a project-based lesson. These lessons will be grouped into topic-related units and distributed to all schools electronically.

The CHARMS Collaborative in Massachusetts is instituting A More Perfect Union in consortium with selected school districts from the Bi-County and North River Collaboratives. The program will work most intensely in three districts located south of Boston that have not met annual instructional goals. Teachers who receive professional development through the program will do a significant amount of reading in the philosophy and pedagogy of history. Each year, they will participate in an 8-day summer seminar, a field trip, and four half-day meetings during the school year that address implementation of seminar content. Classroom implementation of teacher-created lesson plans will be facilitated by three coordinators and a pedagogical specialist. The same 45 teachers will participate throughout all three years of the program. They will explore the origins and evolution of America's fundamental political ideals, traditions, and constitutional institutions. Because the targeted districts include an increasing number of English Language Learners, A More Perfect Union will emphasize strategies that complement the Sheltered Instructional Observation Protocol. Also, teachers will learn to situate events within narrative frameworks and incorporate biography in their teaching. A project Web site will include the syllabi of the summer seminars and advice for their use in venues beyond the collaborative. The site will also house historical materials, essays, model lesson plans, and other teaching materials.

Teachers in five public school districts in Massachusetts—Burlington, Bedford, Lexington, Woburn, and Somerville—have identified professional development in American history as a "high need" as they serve many immigrant and migrant English Language Learners who lack a solid foundation in U.S. history. Making Freedom will offer professional development that features summer institutes, 3-day seminars, and 9-day study tours, with separate tracks for elementary and secondary teachers. Other activities will include a day-long workshop and two 3-hour after-school workshops annually on technology integration, continuation activities to ensure effective application of teacher work products, four history book groups a year, and collaborative activities that include a blog and participation in full-day conferences in Years 2, 3, and 4. Incentives such as stipends and college credits will be used to recruit an average of 90 teachers each year. After completing either the summer institutes or the core school year programs, participants can apply for a study tour, with the school districts’ goal being development of a pool of master teachers. Program activities will revolve around the people, perspectives, documents, and events involved in "making freedom." Instructional strategies will integrate differentiated instruction, historical thinking skills, and technology to develop students’ document analysis and inquiry skills. Teacher work products—reflective papers, research papers, discussion journals, book reviews, lesson plans, blog posts, and multimedia presentations—will be disseminated via the program Web site and at project conferences.

Boston Public Schools includes 143 schools. The 79 schools in the American Scripture project constitute the district's lowest-performing schools, where teacher turnover is high and student scores in reading and English language arts are especially low. To address student needs and teachers' weak American history credentials, the project will offer the following activities annually: a 5-day summer institute that includes exploration of Boston’s historical sites and research of manuscript collections; follow-up seminars during the school year to build a teacher-leader network and supply new content; teacher inquiry groups that incorporate Lesson Study; 3-day historical investigations led by Facing History and Ourselves; and summer content workshops. Three district history coaches will support participants' development as teacher leaders. The 3-year American Scripture program will provide professional development to 50 teachers in Year 1, another 100 in Year 2, and yet another 100 in Year 3 for a total of 250 teachers. Each annual program will focus on a different theme (liberty, equality, and constructing community) and will investigate enduring achievements and challenges of American national life that recur generation after generation. Instructional strategies will focus on using primary documents as a springboard for the development of historical thinking and writing skills. Students in all grades will write a multidraft essay in response to a district-wide common writing assignment in history. Lesson plans and videotaped lessons created during the program will be posted on the district's Intranet.

These northeastern Massachusetts districts have underperforming elementary and middle schools that need improvement, history teachers who need training for recertification, and high schools that need to increase the numbers of students who take honors or Advanced Placement history courses. Imagination, Invention and Innovation aims to meet these needs through annual week-long summer institutes, two full-day content workshops, two or three afterschool book discussions, one or more local field trips, and two technology seminars. Every year will offer a 4-day study tour of regional sites, and an annual conference will bring together a keynote speaker and teacher presentations based on work done during the year. The project has two tracks—elementary and secondary. In addition, 10 graduate students who are preservice teachers will also participate. As they work toward embedding current historical scholarship and strong pedagogical skills into teaching, elementary teachers will focus on U.S. history as it relates to historical and geographical topics, plus early settlement and state history. Secondary teachers will consider key themes, including colonization, the Revolution and early Republic, the Civil War and Reconstruction, immigration, and the development of modern America. Strategies will include using biography, historical fiction, and visual arts to enrich teaching, strengthening the use of instructional technology, and combining lectures and facilitated discussion with experiential, hands-on learning and self-discovery. These strategies will be modeled by academic historians during content workshops. After the grant ends, project impact will be sustained by a teacher-scholar network supported by technology, teacher-created resource guides focused on specific topics and adaptable for classroom use, and teacher-developed curriculum modules.

Prince George's County, the 15th largest district in the country, has a student population more than 95 percent minority—a reflection, in part, of its large African American middle class. The district is classified as in need of improvement and has a disproportionate number of inexperienced, unlicensed teachers at low-performing schools. Its proximity to the nation's capital and to some remarkable experiments in suburban living (e.g., the New Deal community of Greenbelt) makes visits to key sites accessible for experiential learning by teachers and students. Each 2-year program of American History at Home will include a 2-day introduction, six 2-day bridge sessions and three 5-day summer institutes, all of which will be integrated with pedagogy sessions that transfer the content knowledge into practice. For participating in these activities, teachers will earn six graduate-level history course credits and three graduate-level education course credits. The project will train two 2-year cohorts of 50 teachers each. Because of the great need among ninth grade students, the goal will be to recruit 30 percent of teachers from this grade level. American History at Home will explore two thematic questions: (1) How did depression, war, and postwar growth reshape local communities? and, (2) What role did science and technology play in the histories of the county and of the nation during this period? Beginning with assigned readings and writing tasks, teachers will explore several interpretive frameworks and historiographic debates (e.g., consensus vs. conflict, technological momentum, statism and anti-statism). Pedagogical strategies will include creating multimedia classroom activities and employing strategic historical thinking.

The Project PAST consortium includes both the regular and special education cooperatives for central Kentucky. They serve six districts that are in some phase of corrective action. Teachers in this rural region have had few opportunities for history professional development, and many would not be considered highly qualified to teach American history. Each year, the project plans to address a broad topic through six components: six historical encounters, a 3-day summer colloquium, a 2-day historical field institute, a mentoring and observation opportunity, three 5-hour online learning sessions, and two day-long curriculum institutes. Two cohorts of 50 high school teachers will participate; the first in Years 1 to 3 and the second in Years 4 and 5. As one strategy to achieve its goal of fusing immersion in content with training in practical classroom application, Project PAST will prepare the members of Cohort 1 to act as coaches to teachers in Cohort 2. All teachers will gain experience with using original documents, collaborating in grade-level teams, addressing the multiple abilities of students, and spiraling content to lead students from basic to critical thinking. Strategies will include theory-based instruction, creating standards-based lessons and authentic assessments, peer mentoring, and observation using a standard walk-through protocol, and integrating the fine arts and the humanities into history instruction. Project products will include a Moodle site—an Intranet-based learning platform that houses online lessons, discussions boards, curriculum, and interactive teaching resources—and a collection of standards-based lessons created by participants that will be available to all teachers in the consortium.