The Liberty Fellowship provides critical, high-quality professional development opportunities to all school districts through a “train-the-trainer” approach. Fifty representative teachers (grades 4 – 12 suggested) from the consortium districts will be selected as Fellows to participate in the three-year program. Districts send high school teachers to serve as content specialists on vertical teams of 4 th to 12 th grade teachers. They assist the elementary trainers in applying substantive content to elementary and middle school lessons. Fellows are trained to turnkey sessions within their home districts, and at local, state, and national conferences. Fellows instruct colleagues on how to teach substantive American History as a continuum, not as a series of disconnected events.

As professionally trained leaders, Fellows assist other teachers by mentoring, modeling, and peer coaching. Vertical teams will identify and eliminate gaps and overlaps within district history curricula and between history curricula of sending elementary districts and their regional secondary schools.

The AIHE will develop a Liberty Fellowship DVD series and interactive website specifically for your program to help you sustain and disseminate the Fellowship for years to come. Participants become proficient in preparing dissemination materials and workshops that will extend beyond the scope of the grant period. Fellows will disseminate project activities at district workshops and other local, state, and national conferences. The Fellowship’s DVDs will be disseminated at those conferences and access to the Fellowship website will reach teachers across the nation.

The Liberty Fellowship Teaching American History Grant’s impact will reach tens of thousands of students in the consortium districts throughout the district’s area or county. The Fellowship’s dissemination activities will further impact hundreds of thousands of students throughout the state and the nation, through the Fellowship’s interactive website and DVD series. These electronic resources will contain all the professors’, history education specialists’, and the Fellows’ historical narratives, unit-lessons, AIHE program lessons, PowerPoint presentations, and videos of sessions and lectures. The Fellowship curriculum and professional development model serves as a national archetype for American History education. These tools will allow the consortium to sustainthe Fellowship program for years to come.