Program Overview 

Each year, 30 teacher historians will be selected to participate and will commit to a year-long program. The consortium aims to connect secondary educators to traditional American history scholarship and provide intense seminar learning opportunities to delve more deeply into specific materials content.

Through graduate seminar-style classroom learning coupled with experiential field study opportunities, the districts strive to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of traditional American history among our social studies staff and by extension improve instruction and raise student achievement. Content-intensive seminars will provide teachers an opportunity for scholarly discussion with experts so they may become fluent enough to serve as program ambassadors presenting content and materials at professional conferences and district in-services.

Additionally, participants will create thought-provoking lesson plans focusing on traditional American history, which will be uploaded to a digital library accessible to history teachers nationwide, ensuring a lasting impact for products developed through the professional development endeavor. The curriculum writing component will encourage our teacher historians to think of themselves as historians as they delve into historical archives and conduct their own historical research. Our digital materials library will serve as a national model of excellence, a place where educators can go for academically rigorous, thoughtful, stimulating, and reliable resources and lessons on traditional American history.

Each year, the Teachers as Historians program will focus on a specific historical period in American history through a two-week summer seminar, one-week experiential field study, and academic year workshops and field studies.

• Year one: A Nation is Born, 1492-1815, will provide an in-depth analysis of the establishment and underpinnings of our democracy. Historical content will include: colonization and settlement, origins of slave culture, the Revolutionary Era, founding fathers, founding documents and the Early Republic.
• Year two: Transformation of the Republic, 1801-1920, will include: Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialization and urbanization, immigration, and the Progressive Era.  
• Year three: Modern America and the Global Community, 1914-present, will include: World War I; the Roaring 20s; the Great Depression and the New Deal; World War II; The Cold War; 1960s: Civil Rights, Counter-culture and Vietnam; landmark supreme court cases; and contemporary issues facing the United States.
• Year four: American Diversity and Identity, will include: the roles of race, class, ethnicity, and gender in the history of the United States, and in terms of identity, views of the American national character, ideas about American exceptionalism, and regional differences in identity among Americans. 

Program Themes
The program will focus on themes in traditional American history and will emphasize significant issues, episodes and turning points in the history of the United States.

• Theme one, Foundations of Democracy, will provide an in-depth analysis of the establishment and underpinnings of our democracy. Participants will examine how the principles of freedom and democracy articulated in the nation’s founding documents have shaped America’s struggles and achievements and its social, political, and legal institutions and relations.
• Theme two, Movers and Shapers: Profiles in Leadership, will provide an investigation of key figures and movements in American history that have shaped the future trajectory of the nation. Through the investigation of critical documents in American history, the emphasis of theme two will be on how the words and deeds of individual Americans have determined the course of our nation, and how the work of various individuals builds to something greater than the sum of their parts.
• Theme three, the United States and the Global Community, will examine U.S. engagement with foreign powers over time. The emphasis of theme three will be on significant issues, episodes and turning points in the history of the United States and the global community with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy.
• Theme Four, Diversity and Identity, will examine a broad range of issues including immigration, labor, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, foreign and domestic policy.