We were working now on the New York City draft riots. I was asked to do some work with visual materials, which is the area that I'm probably most interested in, in thinking about teaching at every level. And so I went, you know, and looked for some materials, and I looked in various books on the draft riots and what was out on the web, and it wasn't hard to find materials.

There were materials from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, from Harper's. But I had the really interesting sort of research problem of, "Well, here are these images." What I railed against, of course, is the lack of context. These images appeared in illustrated newspapers and journals with articles, with text, which surrounded it and contextualized it, which framed how the readers would view it because they wouldn't just look at the pictures the way we do. Sort of a similar experience to when we look at a Louis Hine photograph on a wall but forget that it was actually maybe part of a poster or a newspaper article that very much framed how someone in a progressive era would have seen that, and this is a really valuable lesson.

I went to one of the online databases, HarpWeek, as well as Frank Leslie's database. I had some Frank Leslie material, and sort of gave the teachers the next day after I'd done my little research, a few of the articles and images together. And they were just really bowled over. They got my point immediately that, oh, here's another. And they made—second, they really found these really interesting juxtapositions. One article on the draft riots had, one teacher pointed out, a little squib in the corner of the page where it was announced that the social season was beginning in Newport. All these various politicians had gone off to Newport, and it was very odd, obviously, to think that while this sort of blood bath was going on in the streets of New York City, the social season was beginning in Newport and these, you know, politicians and other dignitaries had gone off to start the season. And they, of course, realized, you know, their students would be immensely interested.

So, again, it was sort of careful reading. It was careful viewing, and it was research. And they again rushed past me, the teachers I was involving in this discussion, to say, "Oh, I could do this as a research project." My students could sort of take this instead of what I did, what I found interesting, I could really turn it around and ask them to go dig in that database and come back with little things.

Again, I think one of the great dilemmas with now that we keep talking about using images is we forget that we really want them grounded as well with text, and that's how, often, they appear.

Alice: One of the reasons why we chose K-3 is because we feel that they are a very underserved group. While we live in the suburbs of Washington and have access to lots of institutions that offer professional development, most of these programs are geared towards secondary teachers. And so the K-3 people are required to teach history in their classrooms because of our state standards and requirements, yet they are generalists, they do not have the background knowledge, and they really don't have access to targeted professional development.

Cynthia: They were very easily recruited, and then turned around and quickly recruited other teachers. So, this is a group that had extraordinary enthusiasm for what we were doing because they sense that need in their classrooms.

Alice: We did have elementary teachers in our previous grants, and while it was, again, the focus was content, we felt that some of our elementary teachers were intimidated by the content knowledge base of our secondary teachers, who could at times be very intense and passionate about history. And so we decided that as an underserved group, it would be easier to really address their background needs and get them comfortable with the history content, to give them the confidence to be able to do some interesting, engaging, creative ways of instruction.

Cynthia: They read three books during our one-year TAH program, but over the course of the years, they've come back to me with volumes and volumes that they've read.

Alice: And then that enthusiasm that was developed comes across in their instruction, runs over into the kids.

And another unintended consequence of this also was the kids going home and telling their parents. Because at the primary level, parents are always asking, "What did you do in school today? What did you learn?" And the kids were just bubbling about what had happened in school and what they had done in history class and learned about it. And with our large ELL population, these are parents that do not have a background in American history, and so the parents are also learning from the kids. And of course, that motivates the kids more because their parents are interested. So, it was a very nice unintended consequence.

Cynthia: A lot of our K-3 classrooms are covered with little stickies because wherever, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt is up in the classroom, kids come back with little stickies of what they've Googled about Eleanor Roosevelt and stuck up on the wall. So, there's evidence everywhere of the enthusiasm and the sort of taking root of history that's happening outside of the classroom. And they are pulling their parents along with it, too, according—at least anecdotally—to our teachers.

Cynthia: We have a one-week Summer Institute, and it has to do a lot with our emphasis on working with teachers to emphasize object learning, to emphasize the use of primary documents or photographs or, you know, anything that small children can really get their hands on. Using time and place, location, and—

Alice: Biographies.

Cynthia: And biographies.

We spend one day at Gunston Hall learning about the Constitution, learning about a lot of American historical figures, and as heroes and what their heroic attributes are along with their humanity. And then we spend a day at various Smithsonian Museums. We've had a wonderful experience at the Postal Museum, at the National Museum of American History, at the Portrait Gallery, at American Art.

And then the last day we have spent at Mount Vernon, primarily focused on George Washington. And that has turned into a really special day because there's obviously a large number of wonderful historical scholars on the subject of Washington. But so many now have become very comfortable in using place, you know, using the mansion and the grounds to talk about Washington as a farmer and as a recorder and as a hero during the war, a leader that walked away from power.

So we've got scholarly discussions going on after tours. And then, finally, we've brought in some experts in primary education that take those George Washington lessons and bring teachers down around the floor creating maps on, you know, a shower curtain, and doing mathematical exercises coming out of the lessons of where Washington's armies were, etc., etc. So, really, cross-curricular work in showing how that scholarship in one massive lesson can be brought to bear on math, on language arts, on social studies, and so on and so forth. And then we follow that up during the school year with two full-day academic experiences like that. One of them we do at the National Museum of American Indian because they study the various Native cultures.

And another one where we work with them full-day in one of our high schools in their theater department with their theater coaches and sometimes their kids, to teach the teachers how to become those, to become Martha Washington instead of talking about Martha Washington, so that every day is kind of an exciting theatrical production in a first-grade classroom. And then there are two book talks, which happen after school, a three-hour period, where they sit down with a scholar and discuss the books that they've read.

Alice: So, the content and the teaching of historical thinking is done through really four different strands. Biographies, because so many of them are emphasized in our state-required curriculum. Object-based learning, because many of these primary kids we recognize can't read, but yet visually are able to think historically. Teaching history through time and place, and we recognize that that whole idea of time and sequencing and chronological order is probably the hardest thing to teach primary kids, but using it in a way that makes it engaging and motivating. And then the fourth one is to teach history through art, music, and drama. And that's the content that we base this whole module for the K-3 folks on.

Cynthia: We've been really happy with the fact that people who start this program finish it. We have very little absenteeism, and so, in other words, the load is not too heavy, but certainly they walk away with a lot of materials and a lot of ideas and a lot of scholarship.

Alice: And the expectation is for teachers to attend, obviously, all of these sessions and participate, participate in our rigorous evaluation program, which we have, as well as to produce a lesson plan using some of the content that they have learned and a primary source. These lesson plans are then posted on our local Blackboard site for our teachers to share, and so they can then see the implementation of it.

Cynthia: And I think it's important to note that on our pre- and post-evaluations of teachers and kids in this program, we saw by far the greatest gain amongst our K-3 teachers because, admittedly, they didn't have that background, so they tend to learn very quickly.

It's that pedagogy and the historical thinking, "Well, if they can do that in second grade, I can do that in third grade," or "I can do that in fourth grade."

Alice: Within a school, it's, even though other teachers may be—other grade levels may be teaching different content, it's that pedagogy and the historical thinking, "Well, if they can do that in second grade, I can do that in third grade," or "I can do that in fourth grade." And the kids are starting to demand it too because the kids are starting to say, "Well, last year we did such and such," and so we're starting to see that ripple effect as well, which is really neat to see. And the confidence level of the teachers, because they can go beyond what our state document requires, which is pretty detailed in terms of content.

And really, to me, putting the story back in history, and we all know that given the story and the relevance of those stories, it can be much more motivating and engaging for kids.

Cynthia: And I have to say to be straight up, they desperately need the resources in those classrooms. There are very few of them. Every time I was out with teachers, they were spending every dime they'd ever earned buying things for their classroom. So, if we were able to give them some of the tools, the objects, recreate colonial games and those kinds of things, teach the letters with a colonial doll in the way that they used to teach them in colonial times. That's something that's deeply appreciated by them, and I think it's a little bit of a give-back to them to give them those tools that they really need.

Alice: So, we gave, as part of the grant, each of these primary teachers received an artifact box with a lot of these objects in it that they would then take back to their classroom.

Frankly kids prefer non-fiction. They want to know it's a true story. They want to know history.

Cynthia: Primary teachers really appreciate the information to go back to their schools to say, "I'm not taking time away from 'No Child Left Behind,' a subject. I am in fact using history to teach literacy. I am teaching reading through non-fiction." And frankly kids prefer non-fiction. They want to know it's a true story. They want to know history.

I didn't have to recruit at all K-3. They recruited each other. They had set up after school specials to pull people in and say, "This is what I got. This is what I did. This is why I loved it." And they were always full, those groups.

Cynthia: One of the most amazing lessons was one that absolutely defies description. A young teacher in the program who was an English as a Second Language teacher, but she was working within a large classroom. So, it was close to 30 second graders, and there was maybe a third of those where English was not their first language. And she was working with small children, young children, and she was working with four important documents. So, she had a relatively large version of the Constitution, next to the Declaration of Independence, next to the Gettysburg Address, next to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. And the kids together found language that was consistent across all four documents and highlighted and colored and circled and whatnot, and talked about what those concepts were, and did those concepts mean the same thing at the founding of the nation as they did in the time of Martin Luther King? She then put a couple of those at least, on audio, so an actor was reading the Gettysburg address, and the kids hands would shoot up when they'd hear that familiar vocabulary. And then she did the Martin Luther King speech similarly, although in his words this time.

It was utterly inspiring. I think many people would think it was too much to do in an 11th-grade classroom.

She had visual pieces where she had portraiture from the Portrait Gallery that she had cut up into pieces so that the kids had to put those back together as a puzzle. And then they came back together again and discussed what those documents meant, what that language meant, and critical thinking exercises ensued about change over time and what this nation really stands for and has tried to stand for over time. So, it was utterly inspiring. I think many people would think it was too much to do in an 11th-grade classroom. Never true, but really well accomplished in a second-grade classroom.

Brian Carlin: Picturing America is a project by the National Endowment for the Humanities. What it was it's a resource kit, but it's beyond the regular curriculum kit. It's not a little box, it's huge. 20x30 size posters of 40 iconic images in American History from the Revolution to the present day era. It was an open call for schools and districts to apply and every school could apply for it. And our—in New York City, every school got one—every public school in New York City got one. So we developed, along with the city, lessons using the images and looking at art in general and tailored it to classroom use—elementary, middle, and high school.

Philip Panaritis: We've been able to use those images both in our training and TAH sessions. Also we sponsored after-school workshops for teachers. How are we using it? First it was a question of go find it, because teachers would say, "Oh, we didn't get that!" but of course they did. Sometimes it was in a storage closet or it was decorating the principal's office. So the first step in using Picturing America has been to go get it. The images are front and back so lots of times they have been displayed in a hallway or permanently, which of course means a teacher can't use them in their classroom, and you also lose the one that's on the reverse.

The first thing that we've had to do is ascertain, "Yes, you have this somewhere, let's see if we can put it in the hands of teachers." Sometimes there's a lot of proprietary notions in a school that come in and someone—it could be the guy on the loading dock, it could be the principal—but someone says, "That goes to the librarian" or "That goes to the art teacher." And, depending on how professionally generous that person is, she or he may share it with other teachers or not, in which case some—and those are the worse cases—but in general we've found that it's a great resource, it's free. The teaching spiral binder that comes with it provides more than adequate [background material]; you don't have to be an art historian to see some of the context of it. And it's been a lot of fun.

Philip Panaritis: We consist of 10 full-day sessions plus two walking tours. One is downtown New York; last year we did the other one uptown in Harlem. There's a series of after-school workshops and book signings by artists and historians that are—those are open to that cohort and all the teachers that are in and have gone through the various grants, which is now hundreds of people in that community.

For the workshop that we just did we put together a slideshow. One of the images in Picturing America is Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze's giant painting. We gave them all copies on a CD today of the slideshow where we had found 50 different iterations of that image that were used to sell puzzles, sell knives, sell Budweiser beer in 1776[?], sell Las Vegas tourism, all sorts of [uses] from the sacred to the profane. So that was kind of just fun for the teachers and fun for the kids to see. But there's a serious message there, as well, about how images are used to sell things and who owns history and who owns the images and how they can be twisted really in a variety of different ways or manipulated.

Philip Panaritis: The other thing is that the venue for over half the sessions is in New York Historical—or in tje Museum of the City of New York or Brooklyn Museum of Art. With the museum educator we do gallery walks so they actually have—and its nice to live in a big city like that because the point of doing that is for them to see the image in its own [setting]. And usually some of them are huge, they have no idea how big they are, they see details that they couldn't see, even in the Picturing America blow-ups. But secondly that they bring the youngsters back for field trips.

The museum educators and Brian and I try very hard to adopt and to model a rigorous method of looking at images, whether it's a photograph, or sometimes we use the quadrant where you have a piece of paper and you're only going to move it and look at this. And that's good for kids, and good for teachers too, because their eyes are naturally drawn to the central figure usually and we tend to jump to conclusions without looking carefully. So what do you see? Then what does it mean? Then what is the evidence for that, defend your conclusion. One of the things that is nice about art, unlike other aspects of teaching history, it seems to lend itself to talking about feelings. And what do you see in that migrant mother in Dorothea Lange's picture? And what is the evidence that you see shame or pride or desperation, specifically talk about how the photograph shows that or the painting.

So that's a lot of fun, what does it mean, and then one of the questions, and we work with good historians and good art historians who know that one of the things that even in their field is what don't we know? And so it isn't like, here's all the answers I'm going to pour into your head, but if it's really a good historian or a good art history person then they talk about things that are unknown, that there's two or three or four different schools of thought about, that it's possible he posed it that way because. . . ? And what do you think?

Brian Carlin: We don't just take the teachers to the museum and say, "Oh, it's great we're increasing their content knowledge." We're increasing their content knowledge, we're building their pedogogy, but now we're bringing them to a place they can bring their students to. That's their local institutions, they're really good institutions, and they've got the training to do it and now they go there and it brings it all together nicely. From the professors and Phil and I, to the museum educators, to the teachers, and all the way down to the students.

Roni Jones: So we received our first Teaching American History grant in 2005 and Mimi and I were both on the writing group that put that grant together, and lesson study was a part of that grant that was originally written. And I think that over the last five years, we've really learned a lot about the fact that lesson study empowers teachers in their own classrooms.

So even though they're developing an individual lesson plan, it's not necessarily about the development and completion of the individual lesson plan, it's about the teachers coming together collaboratively, talking about the content that they've learned from historians, and then translating that content for their students. In California, they're at the 5th-, 8th-, or 11th-grade level. And I think that what lesson study allows them to do is be the experts in their own class and in their own field and then working collaboratively, coming together to take ownership of that content, so that their students can then take ownership of that content.

Mimi Coughlin: There's something about the process of lesson study is very professionalizing for the teachers. It does bond them to each other, it has bonded us as a community, and it connects them deeply to the content, too, because they can sort of own it, and I think Roni said that. It is a real ownership model.

Roni Jones: Because we're a countywide project, we actually act as a consortium for 14 different school districts, K–12. We have two partners. Our biggest partner is Sacramento State University, and they provide us with access to historians. And then Mimi is the other faculty member in the College of Education that we work with. And we also work with historians from our local community college because it is the institute of higher ed in our county, that most of our high school students go onto.

So we bring our teachers together, and typically we have a cohort of about 30 teachers, and we've experimented with different models. Sometimes we've had all 4th- and 5th-grade teachers in a summer institute, or all 8th-grade teachers. In the last few years, we've had a mix of 5th, 8th, and 11th grade, because that's where the standards are for U.S. history in California. We bring them together in a multiday summer institute where they're working with historians. Historians are doing formal lectures, with PowerPoint, sometimes historians are bringing in primary source documents and teaching them to evaluate the primary source documents and actually act as historians to draw conclusions and interpret those documents.

We also work with them on lesson design, what good lesson design looks like, having an assessment with their lesson plan, instructional strategies that will work at different levels using graphic organizers or student conversations, those types of things.

So that's, that's during the summer, where they're really interacting in a concentrated way with the content and with our faculty members. Then during the school year, we provide them with four substitute days, where we pull them together as large groups and as small groups to plan a lesson collaboratively. They use online lesson planning tools and online learning environments like Blackboard to continue some of their professional conversations.

And then they actually have two teaching events where two teachers from their group teach the lesson on different days. After each teaching event they reflect and revise the lesson plan that they've created as a group. And I think that's really important, the most important thing about that is that they have collaboratively designed this lesson plan so they're not watching the teacher teach, they're watching the students interact with the material and the content. And that's how they do their revision, they base their revision on that interaction and on the evidence that they gathered during those teaching events

And then we have instituted over the last few years, a final revision day because even though they're teachers, they don't always get the grammar right. So we bring them together, we actually have a copyeditor that we work with, we have our historians come in for the final day to answer questions, to really sort of finalize that content, selection of primary source materials and those sorts of things. So they finalize that lesson plan in the online lesson builder and they submit it to us that we can then post it and they can share it with each other. They have time to share with each other across grade levels, as well, during that time. So that's how our teachers really interact with each other and with the content.

Mimi Coughlin: Because it really is a relationship model, where Roni and I and other members of our teams are in teachers' classrooms, they're in each other's classrooms, we have the historians in the classrooms, and we're right where the teachers live, we're right there.

And every time we do a lesson study, at the very end of the day, I always says to the teacher, thank you for letting me into, for having me in your room, and you can just kind of see that they're very proud of their kids and their classrooms, and that's where we should go. If we want to change what they're doing, that's where we need to change it is right there where they—we interact with the students when we go into the classroom, we interact with the curriculum and it's all very, it's very hands-on and it's hands-on right where it should be, right where the kids interact with the content.

Roni Jones: They ask you to list the roles, what everybody's title is and what their role is and how much time they dedicate and you do this nice little chart and you put it in the grant and you submit it. And if you don't submit it in such a way that you even have a percentage of somebody's time—Mimi's going to spend 10 hours a week or the historians are going to do this many hours—the readers can actually mark you down for that in your grant application. But I think what people should know is that as you start working on this grant, those roles and those relationships and that amount of time changes based on what starts to happen in the grant.

So at the beginning we used the model that most Teaching American History grants use where we have scholars come in, and historical scholars and Pulitizer Prize-winning historians and these academics who are very much into the research of what they're doing and their knowledge is incredibly important to us and it helps guide our content. But what we have also discovered is that they come in and they want to give a lecture as though they're lecturing to a room of graduate students and there's always value in that, in increasing the personal contact knowledge, history content knowledge, of the audience.

But we've also realized that we need a historian who can be in a little bit more flexible role, who isn't just giving a lecture, but who is helping the teacher to grapple with their own misconceptions as an adult learner because they then have to translate that for the students.

So we find that we need multiple historians and multiple faculty members in multiple roles. And sometimes you go through a few and it's not really comfortable and you have to figure out how they fit into those roles. And so I think that somebody like Mimi who works with us on a regular basis, and Mimi and I talk almost every day, we correspond by email, we talk multiple times during the week. For historians we may not converse with them as often, but they have to be apprised as to what's going on, so you need a very a clear communication stream with all of those people.

And then you need to be flexible as to how people are fitting into the grant, so having that relationship with historians so that you can ask what seem like simple questions of them so that teachers can really begin to organize those thoughts and that information in their head, so that when they do teach their lessons it's very clear to their students. Because teachers can't teach a concept that they're not clear about—it just doesn't work, it comes out as confused for the students as it does for the teacher.

So I think that the role with historians is very important and I think that any new grantee or a struggling grant really needs to think about the fact that you have to be a little flexible and find where people fit, and if someone doesn't fit that role, you can't make them. You have to go find somebody else who can fit that role, and utilize the expertise of the other person in a different way. And I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons we've learned from an administrative standpoint.

Roni Jones: We had some resistance the first few years because teachers weren't understanding well, how does this matter to me and how does this fit into my classroom? And so we've been able to frame our summer institutes and frame the work that we do a little bit differently, so that they understand larger concepts and themes about U.S. history. So that if we're talking about race, class, and gender, that we're going to talk about that over multiple time periods and they're going to select the information that they need for their standards

And so in the past, we've really worked with 8th-grade teachers working with 8th-grade teachers and 5th-grade teachers working with 5th-grade teachers. This year we experimented a little bit and we actually were working with the Constitution as our main topic. And we brought together 5th-, 8th-, and 11th-grade teachers working collaboratively on a lesson plan.

So we had 5th-grade teachers working with 11th-grade teachers and 8th-grade teachers. And we had a little resistance at first because they really don't teach the same things about the Constitution, but they trusted us enough over time—we don't keep a common cohort for all three years, we have teachers coming and going throughout the life of the grant so that we have some people who've been with us for multiple years and some teachers who come in for a year—and they trusted us enough and they trusted the lesson study process enough that it became a really rich and valuable experience for them.

And so we have 11th-grade teachers who were learning from the 5th-grade teachers—simple things like how to give directions for a multistep process and putting those directions on the board, which an 11th-grade teacher would never do because they think their students know how to do that, when really they don't, and a 5th-grade teacher learning how to very eloquently deliver difficult concepts that they wouldn't necessarily deliver in the same way that a high school teacher has. So we have a lot this year—we actually really—we felt like we really sort of pushed the edge of that for our teachers and got them out of their comfort zone and it ended up being very successful.

Mimi Coughlin: You know, I was thinking about that, I was thinking it is, it is resource intensive but it is outcome rich and I think that—I mean, there is no doubt about it, we have tons of evidence that our teachers are motivated, our teachers are taking initiative to do things beyond just the one lesson. They're taking initiative to do all kinds of things. They're recruiting their peers into the program, they're recruiting principals into their classroom, to come observe.

They're seeing students differently—and we really need to talk about that, the impact on students is—you know, when a teacher is bringing in something interesting and that works and then the students respond positively and demonstrate skills and abilities that the teacher didn't know they had and so then it's this whole iterative process where you know, teachers are motivated by their kids. So when their kids are doing better, then the teachers want to do more. And we've heard that from more than one teacher. They say, wow my kids always want to do this now, now they're asking me, can we do something else like that?

So there's all of that, but then there's the CST scores, which are our state scores. We have assessments we've done with our evaluator that show student achievement goes up, and we can demonstrate that in several different ways. Student engagement goes up. The ability of teachers to apply the historical thinking skills increases.

Roni Jones: There are really two separate things going on. We have all of this evidence based on feedback from teachers. Everyone wants to call that anecdotal, but pretty soon, there's a pattern and pretty soon there's a message that's coming very clearly from teachers—that teachers are actually demanding—calling their administrators and sending emails to their administrators saying, you know, unless you do lesson study, I don't want to do professional development.

Mimi Coughlin: I really believe that the professional development is profound and the leaders in Placer County in the coming years will be people who say, you know, that lesson study thing. . . Because it provided networking opportunities, it provided a clear content focus and a clear focus on the student experience—student achievement, student engagement, examining student evidence, all these great things that you want educators to do.