Located in central Alabama, Auburn City, Opelika City, and Lee County School Districts serve 19,500 students representing diverse backgrounds (43% free/reduced prince lunch and 36% minority). The 30 schools located in these districts face challenges of chronically low-performing students in general, as well as a rapidly growing special education population, as many families of children with special needs move to the area to be near Auburn University's award-winning special education program. The American Heritage Academy (AHA) activities will include intensive five-day summer symposia, monthly school-year activities (i.e., literature reviews, field research experiences, and study groups), ongoing one-on-one mentoring (based on Concerns-Based Adoption Model), and field studies. Participants will complete several assignments and be able to earn professional credit. AHA will explore traditional American history themes - entailing significant issues, episodes, turning points, individuals, and documents - that traverse the Alabama History Core. Content training will be embedded with a variety of instructional strategies, including problem-based historical inquiry (PBHI), integrating reading and writing into history instruction, using primary sources and online collections, and active learning strategies that are effective for a diversity of learners. Teacher participants will create standards-based curriculum units, multimedia research projects, and historical literature guides that will be posted online and be available for use by teachers statewide.

The T-HIT American history consortium will serve teachers in 11 northeast Alabama districts in which 37 schools in need of improvement have been targeted. While 89 percent of students in participating districts indicate it is "very" or "pretty" important to understand U.S. history, 63 percent say they know little or almost nothing about the subject. The project calls for one cohort of 30 4th and 5th grade teachers to focus on American history from settlement through Reconstruction. The second 30-member cohort of fourth and sixth grade teachers will study Reconstruction through the present. Selected participants will be trained as master teachers. Major historical events and turning points will be explored through the lives of a soldier, governor, slave, writer, and surgeon during the settlement, coming of independence, and new system of government period. Westward expansion, the reform impulse will be examined through the views of a Native American, Mormon pioneer, circuit rider, textile worker ,and author (James Fennimore Cooper). Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction are seen through the eyes of an abolitionist, nurse, former slave, and authors.

This small school system in the southern Appalachian region serves a community in which poverty places many students at risk. Since Sheffield lacks funds to provide an Advanced Placement (AP) history class, the SEARCH program will allow high school juniors and seniors to take up to five free credit hours at the University of North Alabama each semester. SEARCH will also encourage greater participation of students in distance learning AP American History courses. The content includes: colonization, settlement, the Revolution, expansion and reform, crisis of the union, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Great Depression and New Deal, World Wars I and II, industrialization and urbanization, and voices in the struggle for Civil Rights. A field trip to New York City will highlight economic change and America's new role in the world.

As evidenced by low test scores, many Jefferson County students are not receiving high-quality instruction in American history due greatly in part to a lack of teacher content knowledge. Due to the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act and determination to provide a high-quality education to all students, the district will provide teachers with the content knowledge and skills they need to be effective in the classroom. Each year the project will provide a different cohort of 30 primary, middle, and high school teachers 216 hours of graduate level American history instruction and pedagogical training as well as additional direct observation and instruction in their classrooms by the project director. Each year participants will read twelve historical texts, study other important documents, and develop instructional units and other resources for classroom use. To further enhance their study of American history, teachers will also participate in three experiential field studies.

Seventy-seven percent of district students are minorities, and more than 75% are African-American. At least 66% of students qualify for free/reduced lunches. Eighty percent of the schools receive Title I funds. The majority of students in grades 3-12 failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress in math and reading in 2004-05. This project will enable teachers to write classroom-appropriate lessons and make salient connections with earlier historical precedents. They will infuse their lessons into a larger Weblessons™ program and augment the colloquia-based lessons they receive throughout the project period. To accomplish this, teachers will participate in six seasonal colloquia, a field trip series, and three summer institutes. Teachers will also take part in a turnkey replication program to train other teachers in their district, and they will be provided with three annual, interactive CD-ROMs covering the material learned in the professional development sessions.

At present, less than half of the schools in the two districts would meet the proficiency standards set for the 2006-07 academic year. Currently six of the nine high schools have a failure rate of 20% or more on the Alabama High School Graduation Exam social studies section, which primarily covers U.S. history. The failure rate on the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. history ranges from to 39-100% in the two districts. The project will use a five-pronged approach of intensive summer institutes at the graduate level, scholar-led field studies, team study/peer coaching during the academic year, single day content-oriented workshops, and an infusion of content materials and resources to increase teacher content knowledge and student learning of American history. This collaboration will 1) provide teachers in grades 4-12 with multiple avenues to develop and strengthen their knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of traditional American history as a separate subject in the core curriculum and 2) develop the historical literacy of students so that they can comprehend informational and functional textual material including primary sources and analyze and interpret historical data presented in charts, tables and graphs.

This partnership for professional development in American history teaching brings together 10 districts with the Gilder Lerhrman Institute, Early Works Museum, Veterans Memorial Museum, University of Alabama-Huntsville, Alabama A&M/UAH Regional Service Center, and American Village. The target audience of teachers in Grades 4, 5, 6, 10, and 11 will engage in blended study cycles during the school year, summer academies, field trips, Saturday seminars, and capstone sessions, and ongoing collaboration through professional learning communities. CTAP organizes traditional American history content into four themes: People Who Lead Us, Documents and Institutions that Unite Us, Issues that Divide Us, and Events that Shape Us. Alabama's role in history is a special focus for fourth grade teachers, while America's beginnings to 1877 are a focus for fifth and tenth grade teachers. Sixth and eleventh grade teachers examine the period between 1877 and the present.

District teachers in grades 5, 6, 7, 10, and 11 will participate in a professional development program designed to improve content knowledge of American history and pedagogical skills in partnership with University of Alabama/Birmingham, Birmingham Southern College, and Miles College. Primary source expertise will be provided by additional partners, including Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham Historical Society, and Sloss Furnaces Historic Site. Summer institutes, school-year seminars, and field trips to historic sites focus on historical content covering Formation of Our Nation 1763-1900 (Gaining Independence, Forming and Growth of a Nation, Civil War, Reconstruction, Westward Expansion) and Becoming a World Power 1877-Present (Emergence of Modern America, Great Depression and World War II, Post-War U.S., and Contemporary U.S.). A wide variety of primary sources are incorporated throughout all modules. The program includes mentoring and coaching, and creating of a website offering history resources and a means for communication among participants.

This project serves teachers of American history in grades 5, 6, 10, and 11. Activities include a 2-week summer history institute and in-service workshops whose context is American history from the Civil War to Civil Rights, spotlighting Alabama and the southern United States. Topics focus on significant ideas and issues, individuals, events, places and milestones, or turning points. Partners include the University of Alabama Department of History and College of Education, Alabama Museum of Natural History, Gorgas House, and the Westervelt Warner Museum of Young America.

The project features intensive training for 10th and 11th grade teachers, through a series of summer institutes and an online distance-learning component. The project integrates a 26-part video telecourse, A Biography of America, with an 8-hour video and web series of teacher workshops, Primary Sources. The program is presented in two one-year parts, the first year focusing on the period before 1900 (New World encounters, English settlement, growth and empire, independence, government, westward expansion, slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction), and the second on the period after 1900 (industrial supremacy, the new city, the West, capital and labor, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the 1920s, FDR and the Depression, World War II, the 1950s, the 1960s, and contemporary history). Partners are the WGBH Educational Foundation, and the University of Alabama.