Description of Presidential Academies:
ASPIRE Teachers’ choice of multiple opportunities for Professional Learning in multiple formats, including face-to-face, Web-based, during the school day, after school and on Saturdays. Professional Learning will be focused on instruction covering specific time periods and themes in American History, as well as content specific strategies to help engage students.
Presidential Academies for American History and Civics will lead middle and secondary school teachers in a careful study of the pivotal turning points in American history covering the following:
Year 1) 1619-1783: Creating and Defining a Nation; Experiential Immersion Trip/Teacher Academy: Colonial Williamsburg
Year 2) 1784-1877: Preservation and Redefining a Nation; Experiential Immersion Trip/Teacher Academy: Gettysburg Philadelphia
Year 3) 1878-1917: Industrialization and Civic Evolution; Experiential Immersion Trip/Teacher Academy: Chicago
Year 4) 1918-1953: World War and Growth of Executive Power; Experiential Immersion Trip/Teacher Academy: Washington, D.C.
Year 5) 1954- Current: Civil Rights and Growth of Judiciary Power; Experiential Immersion Trip/Teacher Academy: Civil Rights Tour of the South
Academies will take the form of professional learning conducted via a combination of night, weekend, school-day sessions, in conjunction with an NCHE five-day Summer Academy presented daily by a Historian, a Master History Teacher, and a learning specialist and a multi-day Experiential Immersion Presidential Academy trip to a significant historical city within the theme to provide further first-hand opportunities to pull from when teaching. The Academy thereby exposes participants to the ideas and arguments that shaped these great American epochs, the documents that make up our history, and the places where the history was made.