National Treasure will train and support teachers, improve content knowledge and lesson delivery, and ultimately have a positive effect on student achievement in U.S. history. The project will lead participating teachers on a voyage of discovery, where they will find treasures in primary source documents, including well-known historical figures and names that may not be commonly recognized, and will explore the development and evolution of the meaning of freedom. Instruction will be provided in both content and pedagogy to teachers through evening seminars, summer institutes, book clubs, release time, coaching, and field study. Participating teachers will also have regular opportunities to meet as a group to write lessons collaboratively and provide each other with feedback. Site administrators will attend project training sessions so that they learn what the teachers are learning and can support effective and ongoing implementation. The theme of growing inclusion of groups excluded from full citizenship and how that process has changed the meaning of "We the People" over time will be the lens for studying pre-Columbian America to the present. Content includes the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War.

Give Me Liberty! fuses a rigorous program of professional development and university coursework around the study of major themes in American history based on the California History Standards. The partners have designed a content-rich multi-dimensional program built around the principles of freedom, democracy, and liberty that respond to the needs of participating teachers. The project will provide five main professional development components that address annual themes in American history to different degrees and levels of complexity and emphasize teaching American history as a separate subject in the core curriculum. The five components of the project include a master's degree cohort, history certificate cohort, colloquia, seminars, and travel study. A sixth component includes remote history Professional Learning Communities made up of teachers from rural and low-performing schools who will be assigned a history professor mentor and participate together in the history certificate courses, monthly seminars, and quarterly colloquia. Content topics include American slavery, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, antebellum slavery and the Old South, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, immigration, and the Cold War. Historians and history professors will collaborate to implement the quarterly colloquia and the yearly study trip, ensuring that these models of professional development will continue following the grant.

The History of a Nation project will raise student achievement in American history throughout Kern County by deepening knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of traditional American history for participating teachers. The project will recruit and train cohort teachers (Fellows) who will disseminate American history resources and model lesson plans in their respective districts. Content providers will support the four main professional development components of colloquia, history seminars, history immersion institutes, and field studies. Professional development activities will include visiting scholar presentations, a series of videoconferences, trips to local historical sites, web broadcasting, television production, face-to-face meetings, and scholar-guided experiences. The project is organized around sequential themes of American history, which build upon each other and are framed by the California State Standards. Content will include the rift between the British Empire and the colonies, the Revolutionary War, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Progressivism, World War I, and the Cold War. A team of content experts will help delivery the professional development series and will support Fellows as they develop and implement lesson plans.

Teaching American History: Success and Rigor For All will implement rigorous professional development for teachers in a curricular area that builds understanding of democracy and a common history as well as knowledge, judgment, and critical thinking. The project will also increase teachers' knowledge and understanding of discipline-specific instructional approaches to teaching history, including literacy skills that are critically needed to access the content. Teachers will attend intensive summer institutes, with aligned follow-up programs during the academic year, at which university history faculty will engage participating teachers using pedagogical strategies to present major topics and themes in U.S. history. Teacher-leaders will present model standards-based lesson plans based on in-depth historical research. All sessions of the summer institute and seminars will be specified by grade-level content standards with morning sessions that will feature presentations of recent scholarship and important primary and secondary materials and afternoon sessions modeling teacher strategies and assisting participants with lesson plans and activities. Historical topics covered will include early colonial North America, the American Revolution, slavery, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, industrialization, and immigration, among others.

The "Becoming a Historian Project" will provide participants with a professional development experience that includes strong academics, nationally recognized scholars, the opportunity to visit major historical sites, and a program of coaching support as teachers increase the use of research-based instructional strategies in their classrooms. Teachers will vertically articulate the curriculum between grade levels; share instructional strategies and experiences; and develop, deliver, and revise standards-aligned lessons that support the History-Social Science Framework for California public schools. Teachers will also research and collect documents, artifacts, and other instructional and historical materials that will be included in "History Trunks," an instructional strategy and activity that will be used to engage students in understanding key points in American history in an especially meaningful way. The project will include a customized Master of Arts in History degree program; a standards-aligned custom series of after-school lectures, day-long custom workshops, and summer institutes; and one-on-one and small group professional development follow-up. Content will include the early Republic, the American Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, and civil rights. Content knowledge will be connected with the skills students need using historical artifacts, books, document-based questions, historical simulations, and lessons developed during the professional development workshops.

The DeAnza Liberty Fellowship will increase teacher knowledge of and appreciation for traditional American history, resulting in improved academic achievement in students. The project will allow the consortium of districts to design traditional, yet innovative, American history curricula and lesson-units that will provide students with a substantive historical continuum, not a series of disconnected events. Through web-conferencing distance learning sessions, the project will provide Saturday sessions during the school year and days during the summer, including field study trips, emphasizing historical content and teaching strategies with leading historians, pedagogy experts, and master teachers. Teacher-leaders will be trained to disseminate the benefits of the project to teachers throughout their home districts. Teachers will examine the ideological roots and precedents that formed colonial America, compare and contrast the ideological and historical developments that greatly increased the rift between the British Empire and the colonies, contrast the agrarian South with the developing market-economy of the Northern states during the 19th century, contrast American societies with totalitarian regimes during the first half of the 20th century, and study the Cold War.

The project will provide teachers with a strong academic content background and effective pedagogical strategies that include active learning, teaching methods tied to content, and the development of literacy skills necessary to understand both content area text and primary documents. Program strands include 1) interweaving content, pedagogy, and historical thinking; 2) integrating history/literacy and developing historical habits of mind; 3) identifying appropriate assessment tools and applicable teaching processes; 4) setting benchmarks and performance indicators for teachers and students; 5) identifying standards, texts, books, articles, and materials to be used; 6) how to observe peers and give feedback; and 7) advocating for increased instructional time. The academic content strand, aligned with California State Academic Content Standards, is presented through lectures, discussion, and readings, particularly in primary source materials. Faculty model best practices by integrating content, outstanding pedagogical strategies, historical thinking, and technology. Year 1 addresses contact and early interactions among European, indigenous, African, and other peoples in the "New World," including the impact of trade, European exploration, migration, conflict, and cooperation between these cultures from the earliest historical records through the mid-19th century. Year 2 addresses the diverse communities of North America, from pre-Columbian civilizations to the settlement of European colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as the maturation of those colonies. Year 3 addresses the causes of the American Revolution, the course and consequences of the Revolution, the development of the Constitution, and expansion of the Republic in the early national period.

The Imperial Teaching American History (ITAH) Project: Exploring the Nation's Foundations will provide professional development in traditional American history as a separate academic subject, with a focus on the principles upon which the nation was founded, especially its founding documents. By having established partnerships with extraordinary history professors, the local history museum, the University of San Diego, and a nationally recognized professional development team, the stage is set to change the way that American history is taught in Imperial County. Teachers in the ITAH project will participate in content and pedagogy-rich two-week summer institutes, focus on pedagogy and development of meaningful classroom curriculum during Saturday workshops, receive mentoring support, and sustain and disseminate their learning gains through a unique county-wide history education organization. ITAH teachers will learn and apply three concepts to their curriculum: identifying similarities and differences; summarizing and note-taking; and the use of questions, cues, and advance organizers. Content will focus on the Colonial and Early National periods, class and gender roles, the Civil War, and the 20th Century. Along with history content, teachers will examine topics on "Group Problem Solving in History" and history vocabulary, develop curriculum modules, receive technology training, and participate in mentoring.

The Story of American Freedom will improve student achievement by facilitating a powerful and exciting new focus on primary source documents and technology in the classroom. The program addresses four specific professional development needs: expanding teacher content knowledge in history; revising district curriculum to align to state standards and reflect current disciplinary research; developing teachers' skills in content-based literacy strategies, and integrating technology into the curriculum to bring traditional historical content to underserved student populations. Teachers will develop their ability to think historically and, therefore, will be prepared to create a curriculum that allows students to model the work of historians by analyzing the important historical documents of America's past. Through the collaboration of middle and high school teacher-leaders, a vertically integrated curriculum will be developed to support high-need students' opportunities to access and understand the history of our nation. The project will include a series of intensive teacher training institutes, follow-up activities, curriculum workshops, and field trips to museums, archives, and historical sites. The program will be based on the work of historian Eric Foner, using his book The Story of American Freedom as a framing device. Topics include the American Revolution, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, women and slaves in the early Republic, abolition and emancipation, immigrants and American liberty, the World Wars, and civil rights and voting rights. Field trips will include visits to sites throughout Philadelphia and New York City.

History Grows in Oakland-Teaching American History in an Urban District will increase teachers' knowledge of traditional American history and improve their ability to translate this knowledge into instruction that advances student understanding of American history as measured by state, district, and classroom assessments. One professional development strand will support the work of elementary teachers (fourth and fifth grades), who teach early American history; a second strand will support the work of secondary teachers. Participating teachers will attend an after-school speaker series, school-year release days, and summer institutes. They will develop an American history "Lesson Study" around each of the project's three yearly themes and an instructional question they choose to research. The different emphases in each year offer separate slices of American history and, taken as a whole, they will provide participating teachers multiple ways of understanding significant events, individuals, and ideas in American history. Year 1 will cover such issues as trade, territorial expansion, and modern trade treaties; Year 2 will cover America's political struggle over democracy, equality, and civil rights and connect it to the history of America's foreign policy; and Year 3 will focus on the nation's stated ideals and will trace how these ideals shaped concrete historical outcomes in foreign affairs. Specific content will focus on the American Revolution, the Civil War, slavery, the Gold Rush, and Transcendentalists. Along with content, project sessions will be devoted to historical inquiry, historical thinking, and post-talk historiographic discussions.