about

== =About the Becoming America Project=

The Becoming America project will offer high-quality professional development in selected American history content and analysis regarding immigration, using the NAEP historical periods 3-8, to elementary school teachers and American history teachers in middle and high school, in 5 Massachusetts’ school districts (i.e., Braintree, Chelsea, Everett, Malden, and Medford) and 1 charter school (i.e., Mystic Valley Regional Charter School), the majority of which have large multicultural populations, making the immigration focus particularly relevant. Suffolk University will assume responsibility for yearly, week long summer institutes, and 8 three-hour fall seminars per year, to 25 teachers per year from these school partners.

Supporting this university-led effort will be 21 national historic sites in Boston and New York City, and renown Boston historical societies, libraries, archives, and museums that will offer a hands-on component to the classroom professional development by allowing teachers to explore the primary sources found within these historic repositories. Three full-time and one part-time experienced mentor teacher leaders (i.e., Teacher Learning Center Directors) will assist participating teachers in merging historical content and analysis with appropriate pedagogy, resulting in each teacher developing and implementing a project-based lesson centering on selected primary sources at partner sites and aligned to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks for American history. Individual lessons will be appropriately grouped into project-based units and distributed widely to schools through a supporting electronic infrastructure.

Over the 5-year span of the Becoming America project, 125 teachers from 5 districts and 1 charter school will each receive 81 hours of intensive professional development in American history content and skills. The Becoming America project will directly impact over 9,000 students in the classrooms of participating teachers.