Project Goals and Rationale

A primary goal of this project is to create and sustain a vision of history instruction that encourages participants to learn the content of American history as well as embrace active inquiry and to adopt the habits of mind, methodology, pedagogy, and epistemology of historians.

The project is founded upon the following principles:

1. Effective teachers address both history content and student learning processes.

2. Active teaching increases student gains and achievement tests more than independent student work with curriculum materials

3. Students' capacity to comprehend history and think historically is based on a series of skills educators can nurture, not an innate ability whose development teachers must wait for or whose absence they must lament (see Keith Barton, 1998, That’s a tricky piece: Children’s understanding of historical time in Northern Ireland. Paper to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA).

At the heart of this project is the recognition that the quality of American history instruction depends on teacher knowledge, as well as continued sophisticated and systematic professional devlelopment, that is both content and classroom-focused.