Northwest History Consortium

The Northwest History Consortium's mission was to provide teachers of U.S. History the opportunity to increase their pedagogical content knowledge. This included increases in content knowledge as well as methods to engage and inspire students. This program was funded by the US Department of Education's Teaching American History Grant Program.

Program Goals

• To facilitate teachers' impact on student learning by:
• Developing teachers' pedagogical content knowledge,
• Providing alternatives to traditional stand and deliver classrooms,
• Developing appropriate assessment strategies,
• Providing collaborative professional development experiences supported by technology for veteran history teachers, and
• Supporting the schools history curriculum through collaboration with professors at Institutions of Higher Education (IHE).

Inquiry-Based Instruction

The Northwest History Consortium uses an inquiry-based method highly similar to problem-based learning (PBL). Another name for the method would be context-based learning as all of the interventions begin with a scenario or context. This is a student-centered model in which students find ownership in the learning process by determining their learning needs through asking questions needed to resolve the problem, tasking, or issue at hand. Often, students will be motivated simply because they have been given the freedom and responsibility of tackling what the scenario or tasking calls for.

A tenet of PBL is that students usually need little or no prerequisite knowledge in order to engage in the problem. The only consideration is that the problem should be developmentally appropriate to the students' background and age group. If students need to learn a skill in order to proceed, then so be it.

Using PBL, learners are hooked or engaged in an “anchor” or scenario that causes them to want to learn more about the situation due to dissonance and curiosity. All of the lessons provided under the “History Lessons” button use this format.