WBA Badges

January 29, 2016

ASHP recently launched new features on the Who Built America: Badges for History Education website, our online professional development program. These improvements represent our continued commitment to providing classroom ready, discipline specific professional learning to history teachers.

We’ve developed four tutorials designed to aid teachers in modeling disciplinary literacy and historical thinking skills in their classrooms. The skill tutorial topics include: thinking historically, building context, using evidence, and reading and writing for arguments. We feel strongly that such skills are essential to effective instruction, and have incorporated the tutorials into the badge earning process.

To make badges more accessible to those unfamiliar with online professional development, we’ve also introduced a new set of entry-level lesson builder badges. Lesson builder badges allow teachers to design their own U.S. or world history lessons and focus their instructional design on a specific disciplinary literacy skill. See our WBA Badges page for more information about this new structure.

Educators throughout the country are already using the redesigned site, including the New York City Department of Education, which approved our new badge courses for their After School Professional Development Program last fall.

We are very excited to announce the launch of Who Built America Badges for History Education. The site is a free online professional learning community where teachers can work with ASHP/CML history educators to teach and create document-based, Common Core aligned units. While doing so, they earn digital badges that demonstrate their professional learning and help to advance their careers. This project grows out of our decades of work providing professional development to history teachers in New York City and elsewhere and features the engaging social history content ASHP/CML is known for. Please help us to get the word out about WBA Badges to both in-service and pre-service teachers by sharing this announcement with colleagues.

We’ve been hard at work on our latest website, Who Built America Badges for History Education. It’s free, online professional development designed to help middle and high school social studies teachers integrate the Common Core Standards into their teaching—and it’s launching in October at badges.ashp.cuny.edu. Our new professional development program, Bridging Historias through Latino History: An NEH Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges Project, is underway. Thirty-eight faculty and administrators from colleges in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania have been active in online reading discussions and will meet at the Graduate Center in October for the first full-day seminar on “Conceptualizing Latino/a History and the Colonial Era.”

We’re pleased to announce that ASHP/CML is one of the winners of the 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, held in collaboration with Mozilla, supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and administered by HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). This year’s competition focused on Badges for Lifelong Learning, and it awarded grants of up to $175,000 to projects designed to build digital badge systems that can help people learn new skills and demonstrate them to unlock job, educational, and civic opportunities.

Our project, Who Built America? Badges for Teaching Disciplinary Literacy in History, beat out 14 other finalists in the Teacher Mastery & Feedback division, which was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Working with Electric Funstuff (developer of the Mission US online game—see below) and the Education Development Center (our longtime evaluation partners), the project takes ASHP/CML’s proven professional development methods and uses an online badge-earning system to build professional learning communities and promote social history and inquiry-based teaching methods. It also helps history teachers design instructional materials that will help their students meet the demands of the Common Core Standards.