Joan Kathleen Phipps of the Acorn Community High School in Brooklyn listening to Peter McHugh of Richmond Hill High School in Queens. Teacher evaluations consistently praise ASHP seminars for enabling them to collaborate with and learn from colleagues in and beyond their schools.

WHAT TEACHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT MAKING CONNECTIONS

Making Connections participants fill out written evaluations of every seminar and of the program as a whole. Their comments over the past six years have included the following:

General Comments

Probably the best staff development I have received in the twenty years I have been teaching.

ASHP has become a part of how and why I teach. Thank you!

I feel very grateful for being a part of this project. It is very refreshing to see that others do see history as interactive. I really appreciate the activities because I am able to use them in class. The environment is good—learning from other professionals is helpful. I enjoy this!

(The ASHP program) has given me a breath of fresh air. Finally a professional development course that is practical and interesting!

These workshops motivate me to be a better teacher!

The A.S.H.P. has brought history alive for me and the students I teach. The recognition I received as a teacher this year is truly due to the American Social History Project. Thank you for allowing me this opportunity.

I was so impressed with your efforts and generosity and responsiveness and care.

The greatest impact the program had was the ability to share ideas with other teachers in an organized, constructive environment whose focus was good history. The team leaders seem sincerely interested in content and pedagogy.

These seminars are mind-stretchers.

Fideline Segall, English teacher, Richmond Hill High School in Queens

ASHP Curriculum Resources

History Matters is *Fabulous!* I can spend years trying to use all the resources!

My experience with ASHP has been positive and beneficial to my teaching. Especially, I love and extensively use Freedom's Unfinished Revolution. It poses the essential questions and issues concerning the Civil War and not just battles.

Our responses to Doing As They Can in class were intimate, honest, upsetting, yet positive. We read our thoughts aloud and were truly connected as a class.

The Lost Museum is so great. I look forward to sharing it with my students.

Classroom Application/Student Learning

I have been able to deal with literacy activities in my classroom better as a result of ASHP. The resources are rich and the students have shown great interest in the material in the project.

I no longer plan lessons without making historical connections (English teacher).

This is the first time someone has really modeled how to plan. My New Year's resolution is to use this template for every unit.

This year for the first time I felt that my lessons on Japanese-American internment were effective. On day 1, students did the triple-entry journal activity using documents such as photographs, letters, or quotations. The next day they imagined they were a lawyer arguing for Japanese-American reparations and had to use three examples as evidence. Students learned the facts, felt the emotions, responded personally, and used documents as evidence!

(My students) have developed a sense of themselves as scholars, experts.

They are more inclined to question the accuracy of sources, especially in their textbook. They are certainly more interested in history.

Giving students narratives and other documents to read and respond to, has taught students that they can think, analyze and respond to this material, that their thinking is important. We have noticed a marked advance in their quality of their comments and their thinking. As the course goes on, I'm sure we'll see more improvement in reading and writing.

Regents Prep

ASHP has helped with my methodology for DBQs more than anything else. The "constructing your own DBQs" exercise we did here was extremely useful..

My ASHP team partner and I linked our classes on the topic "what it means to be an American." I used a song and a poem and created a Regents III based on the works. It worked very well and the students came to understand the difficulty in writing the controlling idea essay.

I've used ASHP materials to develop listening activities for the listening part of the English Regents and to develop controlling-idea questions.

Collegiality / Interdisciplinary Approaches

This program has been a little slice of heaven! Really. A comfortable and caring atmosphere where colleagues felt comfortable sharing their ideas, strengths, and weaknesses.

The highlight is getting to collaborate with a colleague. This isn't something that is prevalent in our school culture so I find it refreshing and motivating.

I notice my students feel more accountable for their work if they are getting one grade for both classes for a project. We did a project last semester on 19th-century literature and the Industrial Revolution, and both teachers could keep track of the students' progress.

This program encourages teachers to work together by giving us actual tools for doing so, rather than simply good intentions.

The teachers are excellent resources. This is my first year teaching and I have used a great many of their suggestions. In general, I have implemented 95 percent of the activities we've done.

Mentoring

Our mentor has been wonderful. She understood the time and administrative constraints of the building while providing support, feedback, resources, and guidance.