ABSTRACT
Embedded in the title of the Teaching American History grant project for which I served as internal evaluator and as a member of the administrative planning team from 2001 to 2004-Model Collaboration: Rethinking American History (McRAH)—is the core concept of collaboration and creating a model for collaboration among historians, college professors of history, education faculty, and middle and high school teachers-https://learn.lakeforest.edu/mcrah. In this chapter, I describe our administrative team’s eff orts during the project planning stage and the adjustments we made throughout the three years of the project to build a collaborative teaching community with history professors and school teachers working alongside one another. As internal evaluator, I describe our collaborative model’s evolution in three phrases where the conditions, roles, and expectations for collaboration developed over time to support the deepening commitment of professors of history to teaching teachers. As a teacher educator and staff participant, I share my insights about the instructional principles the college professors of history taught me that helped shape substantial changes in the feedback and direction I gave to teacher participants and have shaped my instruction of history teachers ever since. Conversely, I share insights from the history professors about what they learned from their collaboration with the teacher educators. While the focus of the project was on teacher change (Ragland, 2007a), we found equally interesting results in changes in the thinking and teaching practices of teacher educators and history professors. Th is was a surprising fi nding and one that should infl uence the development of future professional development projects.
