The Schedule

This workshop will equip teachers to reintegrate Native histories and perspectives into American history by giving them a greater understanding of the context for King Philip’s War, also called Metacom’s War. This conflict had devastating, extended consequences for Native American and colonial communities. As the 350th anniversary of the war approaches in 2025, many Massachusetts towns will recognize their own connections to this deadly conflict. The resources provided to educators, who are expected to teach this history as early as grade 3, are often dated and fail to support conversations that promote historical empathy and understanding. 

Participants will receive information and resources to assist them in teaching this difficult and complex subject to different grade levels. This workshop will focus on helping teachers and, by extension, their students access a more accurate and balanced history as the presenters will foreground Native American narratives, perspectives, and resources. 

Barbara Mathews is a public historian who has delivered nationally recognized American history professional development to K-12 educators. She collaborated on the website "Raid on Deerfield: The Many Stories of 1704" and Historic Deerfield's new walking tour app, "Encountering Pocumtuck: A Walk Through Deerfield’s Indigenous History."

Linda Coombs is a citizen of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, with a background of nearly 50 years in museum education, Wampanoag history, culture, and representation. She is on the Board of Trustees of both Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth and the Massachusetts Archaeological Society.

Elementary, middle, high school,. college
U.S. history, diversity issues

Join us for an engaging game of hide and seek that packs powerful strategies! It’s important for students to understand pictures, how they affect us and how to understand information contained in them. Participants will engage in strategies that develop students' visual literacy to support comprehension of social studies content and will leave with engaging and high-impact instructional strategies.

In this session participants will: 

• Be presented with two clear objectives for the session.

• Participate in activity creating sensory clues for visual analysis hide and seek. 

• Works with a partner creating and asking questions for visual analysis hide and seek.

• Share out with group. 

• Model making inferences and writing a sentence stem. 

• Deploy I See, I Think, I Wonder strategy.

• Make connections to vocabulary terms. 

• Reflection

Middle, high school
U.S. history, world history, literature

In this session, teachers will learn about Youth Stand Up (YSU), a new multimedia, interactive, digital civic action curriculum developed by GBH Education, designed for middle school students and for the Massachusetts civic action project requirement. Teachers will explore the YSU interactive lessons on PBS LearningMedia, review teacher support materials, and brainstorm ways to implement the curriculum in their classrooms.

YSU is designed to inspire, equip, and empower middle school students to become change makers. As part of the YSU curriculum, GBH has produced a series of original video profiles of historic and modern-day youth civic leaders from diverse backgrounds. These videos are designed to both inspire students and demystify the civic action process. Students will likely be surprised to learn about Ayanna Najuma who, as a 7-year-old, participated in lunch counter sit-ins in Oklahoma, two years before the famed Woolworth's lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C. Moctesuma Esparza, another featured youth civic leader, helped to organize the 1968 East LA Student Walkouts and to galvanize a movement for equal education for Chicano students. 

The YSU curriculum also includes civic action exemplars, explainer videos, and a step-by-step process for projects run by youth. As students work through YSU's five interactive lessons, they will learn the specific skills needed to identify, research, plan, and carry out the change they believe is more important in their community. YSU is designed to support teachers as they engage and empower student citizens in the process of creating positive change in their communities.

Middle school
U.S. history, civics/government, technology

Explore firsthand with fellow teachers the powerful Deliberations discussion strategy. Deliberations, based on the Structured Academic Controversy model, are a research-backed structured discussion strategy that engages students in deep learning, perspective-taking, critical thinking, evidence evaluating, and consensus-building around contested political issues that they will find meaningful. 

Participants attending this session will engage and connect throughout each stage of the session in order to actively drive their own learning and to experience firsthand the Deliberation strategy as their students would experience it. Participants will begin by having the opportunity to explore the question “why bring contested political issues into the classroom?" exploring challenges and benefits of such discussions and key research findings from Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy. Participants will then learn the steps and outcomes of the Deliberations strategy before having the opportunity to participate in an abbreviated Deliberation. They will begin by reading a short, balanced reading about a topic that asks them to form an opinion about a contested issue. Topics may include whether or not democracies ought to create laws requiring representatives to mirror their population’s gender and ethnic composition, or whether ancient artifacts should be returned to their countries of origin. Participants will then form small groups to discuss the controversy, referring back to the common reading to support their arguments using a structured methodology in which students discuss the most convincing arguments for both sides of the issue. The activity concludes with participants delving into their own views and trying to find consensus among group members. While most small groups won’t find consensus on the controversial question at hand in the short timeframe at hand, they’re encouraged by facilitators to seek some consensus on issues tangential to the question, as well, including “What is the problem?” or “What might be a next step in addressing this issue?” 

Finally, to consolidate learning, participants will debrief the activity from the perspective of students who have just participated in a Deliberation and of instructors who may wish to lead a Deliberation with their own students, and they will receive access to free Street Law materials to help them teach deliberations in their classrooms.

Elementary, middle,  high school
Civics/government, diversity issues, multi-disciplinary

In this interactive workshop, participants will explore innovative ideas in reimagining immigrant education by looking at ideas drawn from landmark history, present innovation, and the wisdom and experience of young immigrants today. 

Educators will explore and learn about more than 150 years of essential, and often overlooked, histories and stories of landmark court cases, federal laws, and movements that have transformed schools and educational approaches for teaching immigrant-origin students (examples include: the impact of Nebraksan parochial teacher who challenged laws prohibiting the teaching of languages other than English in the 1920s; the Mexican-American families who successfully challenged school segregation in California in the 1940’s and whose case became the blueprint for Brown v. Board of Education; the story of the four courageous Texan families in the 1980s whose Supreme Court case protects the right for undocumented students nationwide to attend K-12 public schools); 

Educators will explore the connections and impact of the past on present innovations and approaches for supporting immigrant-origin students at the classroom, school, and district level from experts and practitioners across the country; 

And educators will listen to and reflect on the voices of young immigrant and refugee students today to better understand their journeys, experiences, challenges, and strengths as they grow, learn, and create new identities in the United States. 

Together participants will discuss, share, and brainstorm creative approaches for centering the teaching of immigrant education history and how to create inclusive curriculum and welcoming classrooms that support immigrant-origin students at the classroom, school, and district level that work to nurture a sense of belonging for immigrant-origin students.

Elementary, middle, high school. college, teacher training, administrators
U.S. history, civics/government, diversity issues, education issues,

Investigating History is a comprehensive history/social studies curricular materials for Grades 5 through 7 developed by DESE and released as a free resource this school year. Its design is anchored in four instructional principles:

•  historical inquiry and investigation

• historical empathy and human connections

• civic engagement and current world relevance

• culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy

In this session, participants will engage with the curriculum firsthand to learn more about what these principles look like in action and hear directly from teachers who have used the materials with their students. We will also share key highlights and takeaways from our two years of piloting the curriculum, focusing on what we’ve learned about the structures, supports, and professional learning that can help teachers bring this type of curriculum and instruction to life in their classroom.

Elementary, middle school
All subjects

Supporting young people to become committed and capable civic participants is a goal held by many schools and educational organizations. And yet it is not always clear how to move beyond simply teaching students about their government to helping them develop and practice the skills and dispositions needed for active and effective civic participation. In particular, how can we support civic thinking in ways that encourage students’ civic identity development? This session will offer a brief introduction to the Democratic Knowledge Project’s (DKP) core civic dispositions–civic reciprocity, civic self-confidence, and civic self-care–and why these dispositions matter. Participants will be introduced to a central pedagogical tool in the Democratic Knowledge Project's curricular approach: the use of Project Zero thinking routines, selected and adapted to support students in developing those dispositions. Participants will also be introduced the DKP's Civic Stories, core resources in the DKP's new 8th grade civics curriculum, "Civic Engagement in Our Democracy." The session will offer participants hands-on experience using some of these thinking routines, along with the opportunity to consider how to apply these in their own contexts.

Middle school, high school
U.S. history, civics/government, diversity issues

Using diverse books in your classroom can be transformative for students. Diverse books build empathy, validate experiences and identities, foster critical thinking skills, and engage all students with the richness of their communities and the world. These books can be used to teach about diverse religious or cultural practices, lived experiences, and historical contexts, but they also simply normalize seeing people of different backgrounds across contexts. Books that feature diverse experiences can easily be used in classroom read-alouds and projects and can enhance students’ sense of belonging. Participants in this session will explore a selection of children’s literature that can be used to teach about Sikhism and increase representation of South Asian identities in the classroom, although the frameworks and ideas shared in the session can be applied broadly. We will discuss and demonstrate ways to use different genres of children’s books to build content knowledge, promote curiosity, and foster cultural and religious literacy.

Elementary, middle school, teacher training
Diversity issues, literature, multi-disciplinary

Elementary teachers and school / district leaders are crucial to civics and social studies education! In this session, you will learn strategies to promote civic instruction in your school or district and engage with the newly revised, free, and MA standards-based Children Discovering Justice modules and tools.

Elementary, teacher training, administrators
U.S. history, civics/government, elementary issues, framework/assessment, multi-disciplinary

This interactive session will introduce elements of Facing History’s approach to support alignment with S2557, “An Act Concerning Genocide Education,” which requires Massachusetts educators to incorporate genocide and human rights issues into their classrooms. Facing History has developed numerous professional learning workshops that address different facets of genocide education, from historical case studies to ongoing current events, and more. In this session, we will model teaching strategies and share student-facing resources to explore the impact memorials and monuments have on the way we remember the past, as well as the purpose memorials can serve for society today and into the future.

Middle, high school
U.S. history, world history, civics/government

250 years ago, scores of colonists boarded three vessels at Griffin’s Wharf laden with East India Company tea and risked everything over  “taxation without representation”. Join the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum for a crash course in the “single most important event leading up to the American Revolution” and hear how the yearlong calendar of commemorations partnerships, events, programs, and initiatives will culminate in the grand scale reenactment of the Boston Tea Party on December 16th of this year!

Join educators from Plimoth Patuxet Museums to explore new voices and historical perspectives that are transforming the way we teach our nation’s earliest history and its resonance today. 

In 1620, the revolutionary establishment of a permanent English colony at Plymouth on the site of Indigenous Patuxet accelerated the transformation of a region already home to a complex, interconnected network of Indigenous communities with rich cultural traditions, challenges, and aspirations. Decades later, New England emerged from the 17th century as a hybrid colonial-Indigenous regional society with its own transcultural institutions and traditions. Four centuries later, it has become the stuff of legend with a complexity we are only now beginning to fully understand. 

Unfortunately, the majority of currently available teaching resources offer superficial or inaccurate depictions of the relationships between colonial English and Indigenous communities that do not include the rich and detailed stories being brought to light by new scholarship. "You are the Historian: Investigating the First Thanksgiving and Teaching Cultural Encounters at Plimoth Patuxet Museums" will meet this growing need by introducing teachers to Plimoth Patuxet’s free online tools and resources that integrate fact-based, multivocal colonial and Indigenous histories. 

Plimoth Patuxet Museums’ education department regularly receives requests for tools and resources to teach these complex early histories. Since 2019, web traffic to the Museum’s education websites has increased 250%. In a 2021 survey of educators, Plimoth Patuxet found that 60% reported feeling only “somewhat comfortable and confident” teaching Indigenous history and 66% wanted more professional development training on comparing Indigenous and colonial viewpoints. In a recent statement, Dr. Jean O`Brien (White Band Ojibwe) remarked: “Indigenous studies is a rapidly changing field and it is vital to bring new work into [educators’] field of vision so they can continue their transformative work.” 

To meet this demonstrated need, the session will engage and connect teachers with our nation’s earliest beginnings by introducing Plimoth Patuxet’s free, online, interactive game "You Are the Historian: Investigating the First Thanksgiving." Originally designed in 2002 and reimagined and updated in 2020, the game explores Wampanoag life prior to European settlement and the year leading up to the 1621 harvest feast, today known as the “First Thanksgiving." After a brief historical overview focused on the most recent scholarship which informed the game's redesign, Plimoth Patuxet Educators will introduce four interactive modules and accompanying data sets designed to help teachers bring these new histories to life in the classroom. The ultimate goal of this session is to empower teachers to engage their students in nuanced and inclusive historical narratives.

Elementary, middle school, teacher training
U.S. history, world history, museum education