TAH Grant Services

The American Institute for History Education (AIHE) has very successfully helped districts write U.S. Department of Education (DOE) Teaching American History Grants that have produced phenomenal results in the classroom. AIHE partners with districts as the major service provider, as well as serving on grants as a minor service provider. AIHE will provide plans for two-day or three-day colloquia, four-day and five-day summer institutes, one- to fifteen-day field-studies, classroom observations, web site creation, Cicero: History Beyond the Textbook, and Cicero training as individual pieces or as part of a more comprehensive three-year fellowship.

AIHE has designed a dynamic grant program that is producing stellar results nationwide. In fact, AIHE is presently coordinating and partnering with more than 60 Teaching American History grants in 20 states. Salient improvement in classroom achievement and marked increases in teacher content knowledge stand as AIHE’s paramount objectives in the grants and the Fellowship’s track record in producing stellar quantitative results has been nothing short of phenomenal.

Fellowships — AIHE has developed content-rich history fellowships with teachers and students in mind. We mold the Fellowship to meet the assessed needs of each particular district. AIHE’s Fellowships include substantive sessions with historians, history education specialists, master teachers and professors from top universities. Teachers will explore hours of rich historical content, while learning to use innovative and empirically proven teaching techniques. 

Participants become energized through creative activities, idea exchanges, and interactive exercises. Teachers will learn to study history as historians do. To bring history to life, teachers also attend substantive field trips to historical sites such as Gettysburg, Valley Forge, Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Williamsburg, Alabama and George Washington’s, Mount Vernon, inter alia.

Assigned Specialists — AIHE provides each district with an assigned historian or history education specialist to work with the Project Director and teachers to evolve the grant according to local district needs. Moreover, AIHE personnel, historians, and scholars will maintain a long-term longitudinal relationship with the Fellows through electronic media, video conferencing, the web site, AIHE bulletin boards, and e-mail, well after individual sessions. Historians even host a monthly password-protected “Talking History” video-conference and chat-room session with teachers on the AIHE web site.

AIHE’s state-of-the-art technical division develops turnkey web sites that include schedules, lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations, video clips, and photo galleries of various events. The districts will have all of these resources to use well beyond the term of the grant. Other district teachers can use the site to get the many resources and to post lessons, narratives, and activities they develop in district turnkey dissemination sessions.

Cicero — In addition, AIHE offers exclusive access to Cicero: History Beyond the Textbook, a revolutionary new web site designed by history teachers for history teachers. Imagine every tool you could possibly dream of right at your fingertips. Primary source documents, video presentations of some of the top historians in the country, PowerPoints, map activities, plays and a variety of interactive software provide every grant participant with their own “digital toolbox,” which organizes material by time period and is broken down into three levels making it easy to quickly find exactly what you are looking for.

AIHE Partners — Teachers can also receive materials and training from AIHE partners like the nationally recognized Bill of Rights Institute, the Civil War Society, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Colonial Williamsburg, the Cold War Museum, Save Ellis Island, the International Spy Museum, Nystrom, Teacher Created Materials, the New Jersey (PBS) Network, the Core Knowledge Foundation, Anodyne, inter alia. 

Project Director Training — Included with every Fellowship Grant is an intensive training program for grant Project Directors at the AIHE headquarters in Swedesboro, New Jersey. AIHE will train your grant Projector Director in the areas of paperwork, site coordination, catering, finances and even field-trip planning. Directors will receive previews of how to run the grant, along with examples of presentations, activities, site tours in Philadelphia, “hunting” history in the local graveyard, and time with the best character actors in the nation. AIHE will make every effort to ensure that your grant goes smoothly so you can focus on the overall success of the program. This service includes a Quality Control officer who will consult with your Project Director after every AIHE event with your district.

Some of the AIHE TAH Fellowships are:

• The highly successful Liberty Fellowship — an intense study of the full scope American History.
  


• The Historical Literacy Fellowship — an infusion of substantive historical content into school reading and literature programs.


• The Constitution Fellowship — an intense study of American History through the Constitution.


• The Foreign Policy Fellowship — an extensive study of the United States’ relation with the global community and America’s historic role in the world.


• The American Heroes Fellowship — an investigation of American History through its heroes and how to make heroes an everyday part of the classroom.


• The American President Fellowship — a study of American History through the administrations of the presidents. Fellows will concentrate on biographies.


• The History Through Geography Fellowship — a study of the strong geographic influences in American History.


• The Teacher as Historian Fellowship — a more concentrated emphasis on the teachers’ role as the most important interpreter of history in their students’ life.


• High-Tech History Fellowship — A consortium of districts from around the country can coalesce and participate in any of the above Fellowships through distance learning, video conferencing, “Illuminate,” Cicero, “Talking History,” and TeacherTube.