The U.S. History curriculum enables teachers to:
- Concentrate on the craft of teaching, including customizing materials for student needs, instead of searching for resources and designing curriculum;
- Embed explicit reading and writing strategies in an inquiry-oriented course that prepares students for the demands of college-level study in the social sciences;
- Shift the teaching of the high school U.S. History survey course from presentational to inquiry mode, so that students perceive history not as a story to be memorized, but as events to be interpreted using documentary evidence;
- Engage and motivate students by exploring genuine, challenging historical questions (that U.S. historians still grapple with);
- Complicate conventional stories and take a clear-eyed look at injustice, social conflict, and change so that students can better understand their present world, how it got that way, and what might be done to influence its trajectory.