TPS Consortium

The TPS Consortium currently includes more than 200 partner organizations and reaches all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Consortium members share ideas, information, and materials, and in many cases collaborate on the design and delivery of TPS projects.

TPS Consortium members represent several broad types of educational organizations, including colleges and universities, non-profits, cultural institutions, libraries, state agencies, professional associations, public school districts, and advocacy organizations.

TPS Consortium members use Library of Congress online collections to teach subjects like rural history, civics, ethnic studies, journalism, writing, urban education, geography, STEM, and more. They offer professional development workshops and academic courses; write curricula others can adapt to use with their own students and participants; and create online apps and online interactives that teach concepts, develop analysis skills, and unleash creativity.

Current Consortium members target learner populations that include members of African American, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, preschoolers and K-12 students, classroom teachers and college professors, artists, musicians, English Language Learners, persons with disabilities, and veterans, among others. This diversity allows the Library to better reach its mission to engage, inspire, and inform by engaging communities across the country with TPS methods and materials.

Please explore the TPS Consortium Online Interactive Map to find member organizations that offer professional development, teaching materials, and collaborative possibilities relating to a topic or geographic region of interest.

Creation Partners

In March 2019, the Library solicited proposals from respected national organizations that have large teacher networks, co-produce co-created and co-branded teaching materials that other Consortium members will help distribute to educators throughout the U.S. These materials will demonstrate effective teaching strategies that combine grantees’ expertise in specific content areas with online materials from the Library and TPS program approaches. Drafts of the teaching materials created under these will be available in 2021. The organizations selected are:

National Council of Teachers of English

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) promotes the development of literacy and the use of language to construct personal and public worlds and to achieve full participation in society. The organization has affiliates and chapters in nearly every state and U.S. territory, focused on literacy education from kindergarten through graduate education. NCTE’s project will focus on increasing the number of K-12 English language arts teachers who effectively incorporate primary sources into their instruction. NCTE will create materials, combining primary sources with fiction and nonfiction texts that will be available freely on its ReadWriteThink.org site, which attracts 10 million visitors per year. NCTE will also pioneer the use of service learning in English language arts classrooms through student participation in transcribe-a-thons and discovery of primary sources in their own communities.

Contact: Emily Kirkpatrick, ekirkpatrick@ncte.org

National History Day

National History Day (NHD) encourages 600,000 students and their teachers, from the U.S. and other countries, to engage in historical research and interpretation through well-regarded local and national competitions. In addition, NHD provides professional development events and materials for teachers focused on student research. For its project, NHD will identify and prepare a cadre of master teachers to create and test a guide for developing historical arguments using Library of Congress primary sources. This guide, suitable for both teacher and student use, will support creation of a variety of student products including papers, websites and documentaries. NHD will distribute both print and online versions of the guide and feature it in a four-module teacher webinar series.

Contact: Cathy Gorn, cathy@nhd.org

The National Council for the Social Studies

The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) is the largest professional association in the country devoted solely to social studies education, serving K-12 classroom teachers and administrators, university faculty and curriculum developers in the U.S. and in 35 other countries. NCSS supports a network of affiliated but independent councils operating in 48 states. The organization holds annual conferences, each drawing approximately 4,000 attendees. NCSS will partner with the Library to create online resources for methods professors teaching in college and university departments of education. These materials will combine Library of Congress resources with NCSS’s C3 Framework, which emphasizes using an inquiry approach to teaching social studies. Further, NCSS will create face-to-face and online professional development for methods professors to help them bring the resources developed under this grant into their courses for education students.

Contact: Larry Paska, lpaska@ncss.org

The Right Question Institute

The Right Question Institute (RQI) is a nonprofit based in Cambridge, Mass., created to support children and adults in their ability to ask critical questions that prompt curiosity, deep thinking and engagement. More than 350,000 educators have used the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) which RQI developed to help students formulate, improve, prioritize and use questions A book describing the QFT approach, "Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions," is a Harvard Education Press bestseller and has been translated into four languages. Under its TPS grant, RQI will extend the teacher professional development it currently offers with a QFT/Library of Congress video-based learning program for K-12 librarians and social studies, history, civics and government teachers, particularly to those working in under-resourced schools or regions. Program modules will be available through partnerships with the Teaching Channel, foundations, school districts and other educational organizations focused on excellent teaching.

Contact: Sarah Westbrook, sarah.westbrook@rightquestion.org