Located in South Carolina's Lowcountry, Berkeley, the state's largest school district, includes rural areas, military bases, and the bedroom communities of Charleston. Although the region has a well-developed appreciation for its rich history, the district has never met Adequate Yearly Progress and is in corrective action. Foundations of American History will help history teachers improve their performance through graduate courses, workshops, book studies, and online professional development that emphasize deep content knowledge, strong pedagogical skills, and the use of primary sources and educational technologies. Teachers who participate in required hours during the year can attend the summer institutes, which will include field studies at historical sites. Annual cohorts of 50 elementary teachers will be selected beginning in Year 1. In Year 2, annual cohorts of 10 secondary teachers (participants in a previous Teaching American History project) will join to complete master’s degree requirements and to become mentors and content specialists for the elementary cohorts. The project is designed to establish a strong foundation in elementary school to prepare students for a true understanding of our country's past and its potential for the future. With scholars and specialists, teachers will explore primary sources, the professional learning community, and the creation of a seamless K-5 program of study. Instructional approaches will include balanced literacy for integrating social studies with reading, 6+1 Writing Traits for integrating social studies with writing, and integrating the arts (dance, music, and visual arts) into the social studies. Foundations teachers will contribute to common assessments and benchmarks for elementary-level American history and will become teacher leaders within their schools and the district.

Keystones of the Federal Union (Keystones)is a joint project of the Central Susquehanna and Capital Area Intermediate Units in Pennsylvania, which serve 33 low-performing schools. Teachers in these schools will be given priority status during recruitment. The project's professional development activities will include a day-long forum to introduce historical research and interpretation skills, a week-long summer institute that includes field trips to historical sites, development of a lesson and three extended learning station activities, a series of six to eight Wiki conversations on scholarly works, historical children’s books, electronic resources, and cultural artifacts, and a daylong final forum to share lessons. Teacher librarians will be asked to develop a collection of American history resources and to collaborate with a participating teacher on the development of lessons and activities. The program is aimed at 30 teachers and teacher librarians each year. These participants will explore the keystone principles embodied in some of Pennsylvania's and the nation's most iconic documents and see how those principles applied to their forbears' day-to-day lives. Teachers and librarians will learn about instructional strategies that incorporate primary sources and artifacts, higher order thinking, and extended learning activities. Specific strategies will include use of extended thinking skills, summarization, vocabulary in context, advance organizers, and nonverbal representations. All lessons and learning activities created through the program will be posted on a Wiki to be shared with current and future Keystones participants.

Rochester ranks highest among New York State's urban districts for poverty, and its mainly non-White students speak more than 35 languages. Six district elementary schools are designated as in need of improvement, and 30 percent of district social studies teachers have less than three years of teaching experience. Each year, Elementary Historians will provide a 20-hour summer institute, on-site coaching, and four 2-hour theme-based lectures with hands-on exploration of documents and artifacts and lesson development. The participant cohort will emphasize fourth and fifth grade teachers, with a goal of reaching 100 percent of such teachers in the six neediest schools and 30 percent of such teachers across the district. Bilingual and special education teachers, certified library media specialists, reading coaches, art and music teachers, and English language arts specialists will be invited to participate if space permits. The project will focus on building a bridge between teachers, historians, and students, and on connecting schools to community institutions. In addition to university and local historians, full-time content area coaches will work with participants. These coaches will deliver school-based strategic teaching sessions and model classrooms to help teachers transfer what they learn to their practice. Strategies will include using primary documents and historical thinking skills to help students recognize connections between historic and present-day events. The project will establish an ongoing teacher resource library, and participants will develop lesson plans that align with state standards and employ engaging, research-based strategies. All workshops will be videotaped and mounted on the district's intranet, where all teachers can access the content and discussions.

In these western New York state districts, teachers have few opportunities for history professional development and, because of state certification requirements, most have little formal preparation in American history. Setting Our Sites on History (Setting Our Sites) will address teachers' needs with 90 hours of professional development in a yearlong program: eight school-day workshops to present content, three Saturday workshops to design service learning activities, and a 4-day residential summer institute in Washington, D.C. to link local themes into a national framework. Historians and a regional archivist will present content in a site-based learning format, with sessions to be held at museums and historical landmarks. Each annual cohort of 25 teachers will be joined by future teachers of social studies from Buffalo State College—either in classrooms as student teachers or in project activities. Setting Our Sites will explore the ramifications and ideas behind the American ideal of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This theme will link an exploration of the experiences of eight groups of people in American history who have struggled for and among one another for full rights (Native Americans, soldiers, pioneers, immigrants, women, children, the working class and African Americans). Instructional strategies will include a focus on service learning, which will have teachers design activities to engage students with local and national history. After completing the year-long training, teachers will mentor their colleagues to improve history teaching and employ service learning to build the collections of and interactions with historical sites and museums.

An earlier Teaching American History grant in this Michigan district supported teachers in Grades 5, 8 and 10. Fifth grade teachers noticed that students were arriving with insufficient background knowledge and historical inquiry skills. Digging Into the Past activities are designed to help teachers prepare students in earlier grades. Content and instructional specialists will lead half and full-day seminars, afterschool workshops, book study groups, lectures, teacher projects with graduate credit available, and sessions on developing grade-level lesson plans. Six grade-level history teams will be formed to involve all elementary teachers in the district. Using a two-track system—one more intensive than the other—will make appropriate amounts of professional development available to every teacher. Track 1, the more intensive, will consist of teachers in Grades 2 through 5; Track 2 will consist of kindergarten and Grade 1 teachers. The theme of Digging Into the Past is examining patterns of movement and settlement in American history and how the archeological record helps us understand these patterns. An archeology team will oversee excavations and bring specialized content knowledge into the activities, and each grade-level team will have historians assigned as mentors. K-4 teachers will learn to integrate history and literacy by using history-related books to bring history alive. Grade 5 teachers will synthesize and connect earlier history experiences for students when they begin to study history as a separate subject. The principal academies will help principals learn to evaluate history instruction in the classroom. Throughout the project, teachers will collaborate to develop engaging lessons that integrate literacy and align with state standards.

These western Massachusetts districts are a mix of rural and urban geography. They have a total of 20 schools in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, and teachers need and want professional development opportunities. Each year, Visions of Liberty and Equality will offer a 5-day summer institute that features travel to regional sites combined with lectures and discussion related to the sites. Other events will include two full-day seminars—one in the fall and one in the spring—to study grade-appropriate content delivery (e.g., theater, writing, video), two book discussion groups, and a showcase of effective content delivery practices. Years 1-4 will have separate cohorts of 35 teachers; Years 4 and 5 will add 2-year training for a cohort of 10-15 mentors, who will be drawn from previous years' participants. In Year 5, the mentors will work with a cohort of 15 new or preservice teachers. Taking the history of human rights in America as its theme, Liberty and Equality will bring together academic historians, archival research specialists, museum educators, and experienced teachers to introduce content and historical thinking skills such as historical debate and controversy, bias and point of view, research and analysis of primary sources, and others. The goal is to spiral curriculum development from local to regional to national over time, and each teacher will create lesson plans and assemble a personal instructional archive of photos, artifacts, documents, and other teaching materials. Teachers and partners will contribute to the project Web site, which will be stocked with content, lesson plans, and avenues for teachers to connect with one another.

The two metro-Atlanta districts participating in this project include several schools identified as in need of improvement, and one district has not made Adequate Yearly Progress for four years: student scores on state and other standardized tests have been below state averages. Building Connections teachers will interact with historians and colleagues from different grade levels as they attend summer institutes and evening lectures and visit national and local historic sites and archival facilities. Small cohorts will meet during the school year to discuss content and instruction and to collaborate on assignments. Stipends and a competitive application process will be used to recruit 250 Tier 1 teachers (50 per cohort, with one cohort in Year 1, two cohorts in Year 2, and two cohorts in Year 3) and 50 Tier 2 teachers (one cohort for three years, starting in Year 1), with preference given to those from low-performing schools. Throughout the project, themes will center on placing significant individuals, events, and issues into the context of our nation's foundation and civic ideals. Around this content, Building Connections will help teachers learn to integrate several instructional approaches into their practice, such as using nonfiction materials and primary source documents, conducting research, using technology, and incorporating history into reading and writing. During the 5-year project, each Tier 1 teacher will compile a portfolio that includes lesson plans, primary sources, visuals, portraits, and objects. Tier 2 teachers will produce learning packages that include lesson plans, artifacts, and primary documents. All lesson plans will be compiled and shared with other teachers.

Grant partner Yale University currently manages another TAH grant for middle and high school teachers. Building on this experience, this grant will serve the elementary teachers in the urban and urban fringe districts in south central Connecticut. Here, several schools are in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, and large achievement gaps are not uncommon. Each year, participating teachers will be engaged in developing curriculum units to share with other teachers and post on the project Web site. Other annual activities will include a summer institute/field trip and eight seminars provided by noted historians who will organize lectures around concepts, themes, and primary sources that underlie the development of American liberty. Project leaders estimate that about 65 teachers a year will participate in selected activities. Because participants will determine their own level of engagement, staff expects 35 teachers each year will attend at least 75 percent of activities, and the goal is that these will be the participants recruited from the schools with the greatest needs. With Liberty and Justice for All aims to help students be engaged with the story of our nation and contribute to the ongoing story of American liberty. To support greater student engagement, grant activities will include instruction that helps teachers apply high-quality curriculum, critical thinking, close reading, and collaborative leadership skills. Outside the seminar settings, this will be accomplished through school-based coaching and technology training. The project will increase the quality and quantity of instructional resources available to all teachers and build an online collection of instructional units for all teachers to use.

New Heights Charter School and four other schools in the K-8 Charter Consortium, including two that have not achieved Adequate Yearly Progress for 3 years, serve more than 1,500 students in Los Angeles. Understanding American History will guide history teachers in these schools through activities that increase their pedagogical content knowledge, including after-school seminars and museum visits. Teachers will also pilot lessons and units of study in teacher cohort classrooms and use the Tuning Protocol to reflect on the units and refine them in grade-level teams. Recruitment of participants will focus on teachers with multiple subject credentials who teach American history content; 30 teachers will participate (starting with 24 in Year 1, with three more added in Year 2 and another three in Year 3). Teachers will explore significant turning points in American history and the role of individuals as viewed through the lens of core principles set forth in the nation's founding documents that have shaped America's social, political, and legal institutions. Teachers will employ the instructional strategies outlined by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in Understanding by Design as they design units of study that address "enduring understandings" in American history. Teachers will design 25 American history units of study that motivate students and support English language learning; share what they learn with members of the California Charter Schools Association; and make exemplary units and support materials available online to the larger teaching community.