Conventional professional development sessions at your site, or at any site of your choosing, e.g., Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Gettysburg.

To one group or many groups at once.  Various groups can be located all over the country, or from all over the world, anywhere high-speed Internet access is available.

To a large group or smaller groups. Various groups can be located all over the country, or from all over the world, anywhere dedicated Internet accessible video conferencing equipment is available.

A secure, live video session with a historian, scholar or history education specialist held 12 times throughout the school year.

• Each month AIHE invites one historian or education specialist to present in a webinar format where participants can discuss historical events or learn new teaching strategies. Click to see upcoming webinar topics and browse our archives of recorded sessions.

The multiple-award winning online resource where teachers can explore American history that goes well beyond standard textbooks. Thousands of resources available from lesson plans and classroom activites, to multimedia and interactive maps. Licenses available grant or district wide, for term of grant or perpetual access.

The award winning SojournerHistory.com is an online resource for infusing the African-American experience into your United States history class. Licenses available grant or district wide, for term of grant or perpetual access.

Thematic or period historical background, substantive lessons, activities, videos, PowerPoints, primary sources, signature classroom strategies and methods all on a secure, portable USB drive for continuing use, including topical and seasonal AIHE FLASH™ drives.

• Some Units and Themes include:
  • Colonial America
  • The American Revolution
  • The U. S. Constitution
  • Slavery
  • Civil War
  • Industrialization
  • Immigration
  • World War One
  • Progressivism
  • World War II
  • Civil Rights
  • and more!
• Topical and seasonal topics include:
  • Constitution Day
  • Bill of Rights Day
  • Black History month
  • Presidents’ Day
  • Women’s History month
  • Memorial Day
  • and more!

Each kit covers one of the following topics in American History: Exploration, Colonial Period, American Revolution, Constitution and New Nation, Westward Expansion, Civil War, Immigration and Industrialization, Civil Rights (African-American, Women, Indian, etc.) and Local History.

• Each elementary kit contains:
  • An historical narrative —an overview of the topic; an annotated timeline
  • a PPT that provides an outline of the topic with supporting images
  • Resources from CICERO (documents, images, lesson plans, etc.)
  • a PPT of one content literacy strategy with supporting sources from the time period
• All on a secure, portable USB drive for continuing use.

Primary sources, classroom activities and lessons to supplement textbook history lessons.

History books and biographies written by historians that have greatly contributed to AIHE programs; substantive history books, historical novels, and teachers guides for K-8 students, AIHE signature strategy books.

Using historical figures, such as George Washington, Susan B. Anthony, Mother Drexel, Alvin York, C. J. Walker, John and Abigail Adams, among others to personify the V.I.R.T.U.E.s of Valor, Integrity, Rectitude, Tenacity, Understanding, and Enterprise.

AIHE will work with you to plan, develop, organize and coordinate field study trips for teachers. AIHE will take the time and worry of trip planning out of your hands. Our experienced staff will make your historical study one for the memory books.

• Substantive Field-study trips to historical sites such as Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., New York City, Gettysburg, Valley Forge, Ellis Island, the Hudson Valley, Pennsylvania mines, Plymouth, Mount Vernon, Gunston Hall, Monticello, Montpelier, Williamsburg, Birmingham, Montgomery, Charleston, Tennessee, New Orleans, California and many more!
• Real history experts throughout the trip — AIHE specialists with you 24/7 during the field-study.

AIHE has entered into a working partnership with Historic Philadelphia, the official organization for many of the Quaker City’s top historic sites and attractions. Special field experiences for teachers and students are available.

An AIHE university historian teams with an AIHE history education specialist and a master teacher to provide your teachers with a comprehensive, 360 degree approach to substantive history education professional development.

Teachers will participate in an intense immersion into a specific historical content topic.  Historians will discuss the content topic with teachers, explore how to introduce the topic in class, and discuss how to create activities to best present the topic and activities to their particular students. Topics include:

• Immigration
• the Free-market in History
• Local History
• America at War
• Labor
• Dissent in America
• Progressivism
• Religion in America
• and more!

The Binary Paideia approach to teaching history evolved out of Kieran Egan’s “Binary Opposites,” a research-based method used to increase students’ comprehension and retention of substantive content. Egan shows that humans learn best through contrasting opposites. A child first learns through opposites: hot-cold, live-dead, human-animal, etc. providing a mental schema to assist them in correlating and retaining information from one year to another. Districts nationwide have successfully used Binary Paideia as an organizing tool to compare and contrast different societies within the same period, to compare societies from one era with those in other eras, and to highlight cause-and-effect relationships. This paradigm helps students focus on the essence of particular historical societies and how they define themselves. These structures will assist students in constructing meaning through engaging and consistent instructional strategies. As students get older, teachers will introduce at appropriate grade levels more sophisticated, nuanced elements into the structure and juxtapose various subcultures and sub-societies within the dominant historical society.

In an independent evaluation of teacher-created lessons using this structure that was submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in 2005–2007, classes that used lessons using the Binary Paideia method, scored on an average more than 20 raw points (32.6 percent) higher than a control group of students in a quasi-experimental study. Includes a flash drive of PPTs and materials. 

Teachers will explore strategies, methods, and formulas to use in the history classroom.  They will be able to create activities and projects for students to investigate historical evidence, research historical archives and artifacts, compare societies and time periods, use chronology, analyze primary sources, explore history from various perspectives, and much more. Teachers will also learn to infuse important social studies skills such as writing in the content area, change over time, comparing and contrasting, and rudimentary document and primary source analysis. Includes a flash drive of PPTs and materials. 

Teachers will explore strategies, methods, and formulas to use in the history classroom. They will be able to create activities and projects for students to investigate historical evidence, research historical archives and artifacts, compare societies and time periods, use chronology, analyze primary sources, explore history from various perspectives, and much more. Teachers will also learn to infuse important social studies skills such as writing in the content area, change over time, comparing and contrasting, and rudimentary document and primary source analysis. Includes a flash drive of PPTs and materials.

Explore the qualities of effective readers of history and the strategies to build historical literacy. Teachers will be introduced to strategies for building prior knowledge and learn how to support their students in developing concept understanding and academic vocabulary. In interactive small groups, teachers will apply and adapt the strategies to their classrooms. Includes a flash drive of PPTs and materials.

• Academy One: Unlocking the Code™
  • Explore techniques for supporting students in “unlocking the code” of expository text.
• Academy Two: Foundations of Historical Literacy™
  • Explore the qualities of effective readers of history and the strategies to build historical literacy.
• Academy Three: Visual Literacy in the History Classroom™
  • Explore the use of images in developing historical literacy.
• Academy Four: Ask the Historian™
  • Explore the role of questioning in developing historically literate students.

SSiSTEM is a curricular model in which Social Studies content is used as the base for the creation of an integrated curriculum that highlights 21st century skills and technological proficiency. SSiSTEM is particularly effective in a K-8 setting where grade level partners and cross- curricular teams are parts of the district culture.

History SLAM utilizes state standards and district curriculum in history as the base narrative. Teachers from across disciplines will collaborate to design activities that highlight the skills and processes found in Science, Language Arts, Arts, and Mathematics while using historical content to provide the framework and the richness that will allow students to make substantive connections to history and their lives. Engineering will be included in the Science and Math activities. Technological proficiency will be measured through the creation of these activities with a keen eye toward having students utilize technology and collaboration to produce answers and a finished assessment piece.

This workshop offers a full day of methods and strategies aimed at allowing teachers to rethink their approach to primary sources in their classroom. Teachers will practice both basic and advanced methods of dealing with sources and how to assist students in understanding their meaning. Teachers will learn to unlock their textbooks and allow students to hold authors responsible for their assertions. The sessions will also involve researching the interconnectedness of some of the cornerstone documents throughout history.

Teachers will learn the research-based theory behind historical reasoning and how to build student ability to think historically. The workshop is built around numerous examples using essential history content from a variety of time periods to illustrate the critical components of historical reasoning. The process will involve the application of a scaffolded set of discreet skills, hands-on activities, and practice exercises that are designed to build a foundation for development of historical interpretation and contextualization.

Teachers will explore how active engagement, analysis, and synthesis build historical understanding, interpretation, and contextualization. The workshop will demonstrate and model high-quality teaching methods designed to immerse students in the processes of meaningful historical understanding. In whole-group and small-group activities teachers will experience the historical process through applications of each strategy and method using classroom examples.

Teachers around the country are using a formulated system to help bring their creativity to the classroom. This system requires teachers to research substantive historical material and become masters of the historical content that they teach their students. History education specialists at the American Institute for History Education (AIHE) have created a research-based, ten-step process to explore how to research and to create historical narratives and lessons for history teachers to use in their classrooms. TESTOT includes lesson reflect, lesson coaching and peer review.

Teachers explore how to teach history to elementary students. They will investigate AIHE’s K-5 “History for Young Learners™” series, along with the AIHE four book “Founders” series for 2nd and 4th graders and the 5th grade three book “Documents for Democracy” series. Teachers will explore elementary history education, literary, and social studies content and skills in AIHE’s K-5 “Learn to Read with History™” program.

Elementary teachers will be exposed to methods and strategies that specifically meet their content standards. Sessions within the workshop will unlock town, city, state, national and world history culture and content in fun and exciting ways. By way of these methods, students will become detectives of history while being able to thoughtfully and logically present their findings in an organized way. Sessions will also include rudimentary primary source analysis as well as some activities that will cross over into language arts and mathematics.

• Building Prior Knowledge engages students in building prior knowledge through fact gathering, asking questions, making inferences and connections.
• Unlocking Expository Text Structure focuses on how expository text differs from narrative text and on strategies for supporting students in becoming expert readers of history.
• Structured Note-Taking focuses on “matching” note-taking structure with one of the seven organizational structures of expository text.
• Questioning the Author focuses on the four levels of question/answer relationships.
• Picturing American History focuses on analyzing images/non-text (paintings or photographs) through observation, making inferences and asking questions.
• Using Quality Picture Books to Teach American History focuses on the acquisition and refinement of literacy skills through the integration of history, narrative and illustration.
• Multiple Sources/Multiple Perspectives focuses on supporting students in examining a historical period, event or figure from multiple perspectives.
• Building Academic Vocabulary focuses on strategies to develop academic vocabulary. Academic vocabulary is essential to concept understanding and supports activating prior knowledge.
• Developing Concept Understanding focuses on moving students from facts to concepts to generalizations.

Custom website design including grant specific logo design. The website will host all your grant materials, provide schedules for upcoming colloquia and field studies, host presentation materials, teacher submitted lesson plans and allow for discussion groups to be used within your grant or even across TAH grants.

Included in our website package is a ".org" domain name specific to your grant. We will work with you to identify the best possible domain name available to represent your grant. We will setup this new domain and host your website on our servers, maintain and update the site as needed, and provide support during the term of the grant.