Inside the Inaugural Teacher Cohort Orientation
By TSU Program Team · · 3 min read
The founding Houston cohort met for the first time this June at the Barbara Jordan–Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs on the Texas Southern University campus. The room held Grades 6-12 educators from Houston ISD and partner schools — some teaching United States history for the first time, some who have taught it for twenty years.
The morning opened with why the program exists rather than what it requires. Civic knowledge in the United States has been sliding for a generation, and the decline is steepest in schools with the fewest resources — urban and rural alike. That is the gap this grant was written to close.
Meeting the people who built the curriculum
Teachers heard directly from the faculty who designed the four-course sequence the seminars draw from. Dr. Luis Pérez-Feliciano walked through the first two courses, which trace political thought from Athens and Rome through the Enlightenment and into the Constitutional Convention. Dr. Mark P. Jones presented the second pair, which follow how citizenship and rights were contested and expanded, and then bring the sequence into present-day constitutional argument.
The premise is not that the founding was finished in 1787. It is that every generation has to learn how to read it.
The year ahead
The cohort left with a calendar rather than a promise. An August working session on the first track's materials. Content seminars in September and October. A November session for progress, mentoring, and next steps into the spring track on struggle and reform. Between sessions: mentoring, and the steady work of turning primary texts into something that lands with a room of thirteen-year-olds.
Each teacher makes two commitments over the year — take part in the seminars, and produce a redesigned civics unit or classroom project that puts the content to work with their own students. That deliverable is the point. It is what outlasts the grant.