Looking for an easy and exciting way to bring history to life in your classroom that correlates to your state standards?  Cicero: History Beyond the Textbook is the answer!

CICERO: History Beyond the Textbook™ is an award winning, online K-12 digital resource consisting of lesson plans, primary sources, standards, rubrics, assessments, activities, videos, games, interactive maps, and more. CICERO is the quintessential teacher's assistant. It utilizes a range of multimedia tools designed to engage, enhance, and expand the overall classroom (teacher and student) experience.

Developed by historians, professors, academics and teachers, and including hundreds of primary sources, CICERO covers U.S. History ranging from 600 B.C. to the present day. Providing teachers with hundreds of lessons at the high school, middle school and elementary school levels, CICERO provides teachers with a “Digital Schoolbox™” of substantive historical content, methods and formulas proven to enhance the teaching experience and improve student achievement. CICERO is a comprehensive, convenient, and cost-effective classroom tool available for U.S. History and Social Studies teachers.

Unlike most other online resources there is NO ANNUAL FEE for the teacher versions of Cicero: History Beyond the Textbook.  You will receive all of the valuable digital resources for the version of your choice for life for a one time fee!

Codie Winner: Best Social Studies Instructional Solution on the Internet
AEP Distinguished Achievement Award Winner: Social Studies in the Curriculum Category

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CICERO: History Beyond the Textbook™
CICERO was designed for high school, middle school and elementary school social studies and history teachers to serve as an online digital toolbox to use in their classrooms.  Created by teachers for teachers, CICERO helps teachers prepare more thoroughly and effectively for their classes.

CICERO offers an extensive professional development program for elementary, middle and high school teachers that allows them to increase their own knowledge of the subject, bring rich historical content to their classrooms, and develop superior teaching techniques that significantly increase their students’ academic success.

With CICERO systems, teachers learn how to create a consistent content structure throughout the American History, Western Civilization, and/or World History curricula. The site shows them how to design and write their own lesson plans. It also helps them select teaching techniques that will help students develop a mental schema that builds on previous knowledge learned during the current academic year, as well as, from one academic year to another.

CICERO also helps teachers understand the education standards and requirements applied to their particular state, and it helps them develop clear scoring guidelines that distinguish between levels of students’ achievement in specific areas.

CICERO’s educational resources include lectures from top historians, scholars and university professors, national experts in history and social studies.

The interactive web site offers abundant educational resources, teaching methodology and professional development tools, and consists of two sections: classroom tools, and professional development.

 Classroom Tools – An Educational Toolbox Right at Your Fingertips
CICERO is the ultimate online educational resource with practically every type of historical or educational material you can think of using in your classroom. It delivers a variety of tools such as:

• classroom activities, 
• complete downloadable lesson plans,  
• self-authoring lessons
• primary sources
• standards
• rubrics
• videos
• galleries
• charts and tables
• assessment methods and formulas,  
• period-related audio clips, art, lyrics and music,  
• historical event maps and interactive battle maps, 
• history challenge games, 
• classroom PowerPoint presentations,  
• history interactive timelines and more.

CICERO is divided into 15 historical units with more than 325 history lessons at the high school, middle school and elementary school levels and its topics include:

• Greek and Roman philosophies and their influence on America’s founding documents,
• The First Globalization,
• North American Colonies,
• The Birth of Liberty,
• American Government,
• The Early Republic,
• Antebellum America,
• Civil War,
• Industrialization,
• U.S.A. and the World,
• Progressive Era,
• World War I Era,
• World War II Era,
• Cold War Era, and
• The New Globalization.

 Teacher Professional Development
In addition to rich historical content, CICERO offers an extensive professional development program that allows teachers to increase their own knowledge of the subject, as well as, significantly increase their students’ academic success.

As part of professional development, CICERO provides teachers with:

• lesson design tools,
• information on their state's social studies standards,
• teaching and evaluation methods,
• subject-related primary source documents,
• videos of lectures conducted by historians and scholars,
• assessing performance criteria rubrics,
• binary paideia, links and more.

AIHE's Professional Development Simply Works and Produces Exciting Results
AIHE’s innovative approach to teacher professional development implements training methods and teaching techniques that include colloquia, summer institutes, lectures with America’s top historians and university professors, use of historical interpreters, teacher field trips to historical sites, and use of artifacts and historical documents.

AIHE’s methodology has proven to raise teachers’ content knowledge significantly and roughly 9 out of 10 teachers rate the program’s experience as "one of their top professional development experiences ever." Additionally, 98 percent of teachers recommend our professional development program to their colleagues.

According to an independent evaluation of AIHE’s professional development methods teachers’ knowledge of history content rose by 21 percent. The results are based on more than 20 representative school districts that use AIHE’s professional development system through the TAH Grant Fellowship across the country. Among the findings:

• Teachers increased their content knowledge by 11 raw points (21 percent) in the course of one year, based on their grant pre-tests to end-of-year post-tests;

• Urban district teachers improved even more, scoring 16 raw points better over the course of one year;

• Students of teachers in their second year of the AIHE TAH program scored 30 percent higher on a test of nationally validated history content questions than students in a matched comparison district;

• Urban students of teachers in the AIHE TAH program scored 44 percent higher than students in matched comparison;

• AIHE TAH elementary scores rose 38 percent from the previous year.

 Teachers’ Satisfaction
AIHE professional training programs are also evaluated by its participants. On data compiled from 18 different Summer Institutes and 45 Colloquia teacher questionnaires, 92 percent of 675 teachers said they would "definitely use what they learned in the classroom" and that the training "influenced them to modify their existing curricula."

Additionally, 96 percent of teacher participants responded that the training "increased their depth of understanding of the covered topics” and that it “provided them with skills and knowledge that they can apply to other areas of history teaching." 

 Helping Children Learn American History
CICERO has been used by many school districts and individual schools throughout the country for the past four years and it has produced outstanding results. CICERO’s philosophy and methodology revolutionize teaching American History not only by helping teachers become better teachers, but most important, by helping students learn history.

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