Shape the future today
The Civic Learning Institute (CLI) offers a variety of types of learning opportunities to help educators at all levels, from kindergarten through college, deepen their understanding of critical concepts in US constitutional democracy, US history, and powerful civic education. Gain new insights and develop strategies to strengthen civic and history education and teaching in your classroom or learning context. Our powerful professional development opportunities will allow you to engage in learning design applicable in your context, and our experiences include:
online short courses that combine live meetings designed and led by the country’s leading scholars and asynchronous learning time with feedback from educator coaches on your learning designs.
interactive professional development workshops led by our team specifically for your school community, virtually or in-person.
CLI is located at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is led by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University.
All of CLI’s learning opportunities are aligned with the Educating for American Democracy (EAD) Roadmap, a source of content guidance and instructional and implementation strategies for educators developed by a cross-ideological group of educators, scholars, and practitioners, and uniquely integrates strategies designed to improve your content knowledge and pedagogical skills.
The EAD Roadmap is neither a set of standards nor a curriculum. It recommends approaches to learning that:
encourage civic engagement to sustain the republic;
give the complete narrative of America’s plural, yet shared story;
simultaneously celebrate and critique compromise;
cultivate civic honesty and reflective patriotism -- the notion that you can love and critique your nation simultaneously; and
help students understand the chronological timeline of events in history, core themes that can be found across those events, and key civic concepts related to the philosophical foundations of democracy.