Teachers Teaching Teachers
The History Project at UC Davis is a community of K-16 educators in the greater Sacramento area.
We are:
- committed to raising student achievement by teaching history in challenging and exciting ways, which expand content knowledge and develop a literate citizenry.
- dedicated to supporting and challenging one another in pursuit of excellence in history and social-science education.
"Our time with the History Project folks really jump-started powerful collaboration among our history teachers. They modeled the process for developing units of study and provided us with key strategies to support literacy through history content. As a result, our team has a much deeper understanding of the Common Core Standards and instructional shifts that will facilitate student learning."
Principal Elizabeth Vigil
California Middle School, Sacramento
We are part of UCD's Department of History, one of seven California History-Social Science Projects, and part of the larger network of the discipline-specific sites known as the California Subject Matter Projects commissioned by the California State Legislature.
Welcome to our community!
“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.” — Pearl S. Buck
Sustained HP Professional Development = RESULTS!
Students of teachers involved in sustained work with the History Project demonstrate increased proficiency on the California Standards Test in both the history/social science and the English/language arts sub-tests. In fact, the Center for Research and Evaluation found that the gains of teachers in the HP cohort increased with each year of work. (Click here for a visual showing 3 years of data.) Our emphasis on writing, reading, and critical thinking—skills now associated with the Common Core State Standards but long emphasized by the HP—may explain the statically significant gains made by students of HP teachers and the increasing difference between these students and their peers.
This corroborates the findings of SRI International expressed in this video and those of Gargani & Co., the external evaluator on two previous grants. Gargani’s analysis indicated that HP’s professional development program had a statistically significant impact on students. In fact, Gargani tied student achievement to the number of hours teachers spent in HP programs. It seems that higher the ‘dose’ of HP involvement, the greater gains in student achievement!
