What We Do

Our Statement of Purpose

Collaborating with teachers to make history relevant and empowering for students.

Our Focus

We are history educators who are devoted to helping teachers working in urban schools. We emphasize culturally relevant curriculum and research-based practices designed to meet the needs of a diverse student body. We work with schools and districts to customize professional learning that is hands-on and collaborative. This customized professional learning addresses the instructional shifts found in the History-Social Science Framework: Content, Literacy, Inquiry, and Civics.

Examples of our offerings include:

Reading and Writing in the Social Studies Classroom

Literacy

• Annotation strategies for use with primary and secondary sources. We provide the source sets for this work and use the new English Language Arts Development Standards to design model activities.
• Writing strategies to support the development of evidence-based argumentative writing.

Speaking and Listening in the Social Studies Classroom

Literacy, Inquiry, and Civics

We emphasize strategies that promote small group collaborative conversations that enable all students to participate in discussions that promote historical thinking, literacy, and civic engagement.

Course Design

Literacy, Inquiry, and Civics

Informed by Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design model, the History-Social Science Framework, and Bruner’s “spiral curriculum” research. This process can include

• Creating year-long (“Essential”) questions and year-long historical literacy goals
• Generating unit-level historical questions that directly connect to the year-long question.

Curriculum Design

Inquiry, Literacy, Content, and Civics

This can include:

• Planning for the Common Core. Working with teachers to develop pacing guides using backwards planning to embed Common Core skills, essential questions, and historical investigation/inquiry activities.
• Integrating educational technologies (edtech) into social studies/history classroom.
• Creating history investigations/inquiry lessons in collaboration with teachers to promote historical thinking and the development of skills aligned to the California Standards.
• Introduction to the History Blueprint as a model of Common Core based curriculum.

Ethnic Studies

Civics, Literacy, Content, and Inquiry

Our Ethnic Studies model is research-based and guided by an emphasis on Identity, Community, and Content. We believe that the best Ethnic Studies program is one that is organic and tailored to its community. We also believe that the best way to sustain an Ethnic Studies program is to support the community’s teacher leaders so that they can take the lead in its design and implementation

One-on-one Instructional Support

• Utilization of Lesson Study as a process to improve instruction and student outcomes.
• Development of teacher leaders.
• One-on-one coaching
• Modeling a lesson