Civic Education Professional Development

Looking for FREE Professional Development in Civic Education

The Center for Civic Education has received a SEED grant for civic education professional development (the James Madison Legacy Project) for the next three years. Massachusetts has joined with the other New England states to establish a site for this grant. We need 30 teachers from the New England region each year.

What do you get?

  • FREE professional development which will include a weekend seminar with professional development (lodging and meal expenses paid), 3 or 4 Saturday meetings and online webinars and training opportunity totaling 30 hours of PD.

  • FREE set of texts for high school or middle school students.

  • A stipend for your time.

  • We are also working on making these 30 hours available for 2 graduate credits

What are your responsibilities?

  • Attending all scheduled in-service training sessions and availability for live or archived webinars.

  • Incorporating a minimum of 40 hours of the We the People (WTP) curriculum into existing courses that you are presently teaching. Students will need to be involved in the simulated congressional hearing as a culminating activity. (The process and the design will be part of the professional development training for those who are not familiar with this performance based activity.)

  • Allowing the site coordinator (or mentor) to observe classroom instruction in the WTP curriculum.

  • Participating in the evaluation of the project by administering a pre- and post- test of your students involved in the project AND Taking a pre- and post- test of the teacher (This is necessary for researching the effectiveness of the WTP professional development, not related to individual teachers.) If interested, I can provide you with research done last year relating to this for Indiana students and teachers.

  • Where appropriate, we welcome anecdotal data from your classes and students.

If you are interested in learning more about this opportunity for this year or in the next two years (2016-17 and 2017-18), please contact me at the emails or phone number below.

We became aware of the acceptance of the grant at the very end of September. We have been working on the details for the past three weeks and expect to have more specifics in the next two or three weeks. If you are at all interested, we can accept your application without obligation on your part pending your ability to take part in this year’s professional development opportunities. Let me know if you’d like the application and I will send it to you.

Roger Desrosiers,

President of the Massachusetts Center for Civic Education (MACCE) and
MA State Coordinator for We the People: the Citizen and the Constitution
508-728-4733 or
rodesros@gmail.com or rdesrosiers@masscivics.org