CSMP

Consider the History Project your source for discipline-specific professional development for history teachers.

Our programs:

• model effective instructional practice
• bolster standards-based content knowledge
• focus on the goal of raising student achievement.

All of our offerings are produced through collaboration and research by teachers, historians, linguists, and teacher educators. We believe that the most powerful professional development occurs when teachers teach teachers.

Literacy

History offers a myriad of challenges for students with low-literacy skills, especially English learners. These challenges provide opportunities to use history to develop academic literacy skills. Our discipline-specific strategies make it possible for teachers to develop students' reading, thinking, and writing skills using historic content with the goal of building independent readers, writers, and critical thinkers.

Our approach provides:

• Tools for apprenticing students to think, read, and write more like historians
• Practical strategies for unpacking difficult text structures, teaching academic language, and expository writing
• Time for teachers to design standards-based lessons for classroom use

Programming can be offered in after-school sessions, on buy-back days, or in an intensive summer institute.

World and U.S. History

• The History Project organizes all programs around the History-Social Science Standards for California Public Schools.
• Our programs feature outstanding, teacher-created model lessons and support teachers in developing materials for their own classrooms.
• Academic historians from UC Davis and other area colleges and universities enliven the historic content of the standards by adding depth, making connections, and providing sources.
• Teaching American History grants support many of our U.S. history programs.

We offer programs in many formats including after-school workshops, three-day seminars, and intensive summer institutes. Long-term, sustained professional development allows teachers to be immersed in the latest scholarship, learn new teaching applications, work in small groups with colleagues and historians, and conduct research to develop curriculum.

Customized programs can be scheduled at your school or district's convenience. We will adapt the focus and content of any offereing to suit your specific goals.