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Professional Development Services

We provide workshops to whole districts, to individual schools, or to departments that are tailored to meet the needs of the students and teachers involved. Also, we can design workshops for whole or half days and a summer institute at your site (state-wide as well as nationally). Weekend workshops can also be scheduled.

These workshops can be stand-alone sessions or on-going series. Workshop series have the advantage of enhancing collaborative planning and the implementation of addressed teaching strategies. Follow-up sessions and the examination of student work support series and school-wide implementation of new strategies. The best collaborations occur over three years.

Please ask us about partnering on a Teaching American History Grant. The Project staff have extensive experience with these grants, having partnered on five successful Teaching American History Grants. Visit our Partnerships & Collaborations page to link to the TAHG websites. We can also work with your school and district to develop grants and proposals for many other topics, including increasing student achievement, becoming historical thinkers, and grade-specific goals.

Click here to download our printable Professional Development Services Flyer for 2009

Possible workshop topics include:

• Backwards Planning: Developing a scope and sequence for the entire year using standards-based backwards planning for each unit
• Unit Planning: Focus questions, assessment of student learning, planning reading and writing strategies, resources, writing prompts, rubrics
• Historical Investigation: Incorporating history into planning for student learning
• Research-based strategies for identifying linguistic challenges of historical texts
• Discipline-specific Reading Strategies: Designing text-based analysis (vocabulary, comprehension, evaluating the source)
• Expository Writing Strategies: Genres, prompts, going from expository paragraph to essay to research report
• Looking at student work
• Reflecting and planning strategies
• Professional learning communities for History-Social Science teachers

Building Academic Literacy through History

Academic language refers to the language used in various disciplines. Each discipline has specialized vocabulary, grammatical features, tenses, clausal constructions, and genres. The Building Academic Literacy through History (BALTH) program addresses the following questions:

• What do history teachers need to know about reading and writing to teach history effectively?
  
• How can students make sense of the writing styles used by textbook authors?
  
• How can we structure writing assignments so students learn both content and historical analysis skills?
  
• How can we provide the additional instruction students need to overcome literacy challenges and meet grade level standards?

Click here to download our printable Building Academic Literacy through History brochure

Teacher Research Group

The Teacher Research Group meets monthly during the academic year to develop and discuss instructional strategies in history-social science education. The Group is led by the Academic Literacy Specialist for UCBH-SSP. Applications for the Teacher Research Group are available in July and August.

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