Transforming How American History is Taught

As teachers look for new and engaging learning materials to hold their students’ interests, now is the time to transform the teaching and learning of American history. Many youth are engaging with and influenced by news from alternative sources, particularly from social media, which inhibit critical thinking and fact-based discussion. Much of their learning does not occur in the classroom, from a history textbook, or lecture. Through the facilitation of meaningful social-emotional learning, the Driving Force Institute (DFI) is working to enable and improve personalized learning for students who may have experienced disruptions in schooling and missed foundational milestones due to the COVID-19 pandemic through fun and fact-based content. Further, the pandemic has shown that teachers need more support to complete administrative and evaluative tasks so they have more time for teaching. When our teachers spend more time teaching, students engage better with the learning.

Guided by our belief that history is a question, not a statement, we utilize technology to produce and distribute innovative, accurate, and accessible short videos on American history at no cost to our viewers. DFI’s main video series, Untold (found on YouTube as UntoldEdu), makes US history more interesting and relevant to high schoolers. Our videos are effective because they are adaptable based on changes in learner preference and can be developed and scaled quickly, allowing us to easily reach students in both classroom and out-of-school time (OST) environments. Our content is unique in that we leave viewers with a discussion question at the end of each video that encourages the critical thinking, dialogue, and fruitful debate that students need to succeed in life. 

DFI’s technology-based solution helps re-engage students and meet their holistic needs by empowering them to engage in discussion critical thinking. By incorporating technology-enabled innovations in teaching, learning, and assessment, our video series helps learners catch up on missed material while supporting educators’ professional development, including the implementation of new approaches and navigation of continued disruptions. Further, DFI provides teachers with discussion questions and the ability to measure students’ learning utilizing assessments and a stack of micro-credentials. These micro-credentials help teachers plan with intention, incorporate media in their lesson plans, improve their own understanding of American history, make the study of history exciting and worthwhile, and inspire their students to be more engaged. 

DFI serves both teachers and students by giving them the resources they need to meaningfully engage with the curriculum. Since our inception in June 2020, we have created nearly 200 unique videos which have reached nearly 400,000 K-12 teachers and over 2 million high schoolers across The United States.

Our videos are both open-source and free to the viewer, both in classroom and OST environments, and the impact of our videos is designed to go beyond the academic environment. By asking a question at the end of each video, we challenge viewers to engage honestly and critically with the material. This helps students form critical thinking building blocks which are essential to success in life. Further, when teachers utilize our videos, they are able to spend more time teaching, forming connections, and evaluating student performance, and less time on administrative tasks.

DFI, working with its partners DoGoodery and Makematic, is comprised of thought leaders who are active in both the field of education and their communities. Many of our board members and staff are former high school teachers, professors at teachers’ colleges, and former employees at education-oriented foundations. This collective experience has given us both the acumen and networks to ensure that both our videos and supplementary materials for teachers are in tune with best practices as well as student and teacher feedback.

Ensuring access to relevant high-quality education resources is DFI’s main focus. By partnering with learning communities across the United States, we listen to their needs and provide responsive content accordingly. As we learn more about student and teacher preferences, we shift our content to reflect their interests. We specifically elicit feedback to the following questions: (1) What content is the most relevant? (2) What content is adaptable based on changes in learner preferences? and (3) What content can be developed quickly and marketed at scale?

To ensure that our content meets the needs of the learning communities we are serving, we conduct surveys with our users asking about subject matter, video duration, voice and tone, and more. The feedback that we have received, from both students and teachers, suggests that the demand for DFI’s programs continues to be strong. This is particularly relevant as we come out of the COVID-19 pandemic and many students want the freedom to choose between learning in a traditional classroom environment and OST (out-of-school-time). The accessibility of our content allows for learning to be location-flexible while also being engaging, learner-led, and context-oriented. We plan to continue to learn and improve from our communities and further assess how to best meet the needs of the students we are serving.

DFI has a proven track-record of working with organizations that provide relevant educational content, making it well positioned to serve communities all over the country. Our support from established leaders in American history, including the Smithsonian, the New York Historical Society, the American Battlefield Trust, iCivics, and others, further adds to our collective subject matter expertise. Further, DFI collaborates with Makematic and DoGoodery, two leaders in the educational video content space, to develop the creative content and scripts for each video. Both organizations assist with the creative development and script writing for our videos and co-fund video production. DFI will continue to work closely with its partners to develop additional content.

Some of DFI’s key partnership milestones include:

• Collaboration on 23 videos in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, a proportion of which were featured at the Museum’s National Youth Summit this past September. This partnership has made additional collaborations, including with the Supreme Court Historical Society and Amazon Studios, viable.
• Most recently, the New York Historical Society has requested our partnership to produce 20 new titles for 2022.
• DFI Founder and CEO delivered the keynote speech at the White House Historical Association’s Educators’ Conference in July 2021.
• We have established a partnership with BrainPop, a company that provides videos to nearly 96 percent of American K-12 students. Through this partnership, DFI will help BrainPop expand their reach and deliver content to a high school audience.
• Our partnership in 2020 with the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative (KVEC) has given us the expertise to produce region-specific content. Through this collaboration, DFI created a two-part series: Untold (our video series, found on YouTube as UntoldEdu), which highlighted key moments in Kentucky’s history, and a professional development offering, which focused on training educators on the use of media in the history classroom. Through the KVEC collaboration, we provided 50,000 students and over 3,000 educators with access to digital educational content.
• Educator feedback and our experience developing a professional development program consisting of 15 learning videos suggests a strong demand for the development of more teacher-facing content. We are currently building a “retail” program that will be available online for all educators/school districts.

DFI is applying to Solve because we believe that we have the technology-powered solutions to disrupt and change the way American history is taught in communities across the nation, but we cannot do it alone. DFI’s thought-provoking videos are designed with the learner in mind and solicit feedback every step of the way to ensure the content is relevant, engaging, and representative of everyone. 

DFI was founded through a series of partnerships, and we believe that as a member of the Solve community, we can continue to leverage and expand our network of like-minded leaders. By expanding the number of partnerships we have, we hope to accumulate the market expertise to conduct consumer insight research and the technical expertise to engage with publishers and school districts to further co-develop content.

With MIT Solve’s partnership, DFI will increase the visibility of its initiatives so that more students and educators can access the readily available learning materials both in classroom and OST environments. Furthermore, DFI hopes to expand its organizational capacity by hiring more staff, modernizing our internal systems, and further developing our curriculum for an even wider audience.

DFI’s solution is innovative in how it engages its target audience. Most of our peers design their material with the teacher in mind, whereas DFI treats teacher materials as supplementary to our learner-centric videos. DFI is also the only organization among its peers to strictly focus on American history. By focusing on one subject, we have been able to take a deep dive into the subject to uncover stories and people that other organizations might overlook. 

Our solution is also innovative in that our videos are both shorter than the typical educational video and leave viewers with a question. DFI’s open-source videos are two minutes each, while most peer videos are in the 5-15-minute range. Producing shorter videos gives us two advantages: (1) We are able retain the viewer’s attention, and as a result, (2) invite further discussion that is based on the premise of telling people how, rather than what, to think. DFI is the only one of its peer organizations to leave viewers with a discussion question at the end of each video which stimulates the critical thinking, dialogue, and fruitful debate that is needed to propel young people to success.

Over the next five years, we hope to reach an additional six million high schoolers and one million history teachers. We plan on doing this by strengthening existing partnerships and growing our current network. We are looking for new collaborators who can provide monetary, market-based, and technical support as DFI plans to develop new content that is both national and regional-specific and improve monitoring and evaluation capacities. With the monetary support we will obtain, we intend to build our operational capacity so that we can hire 10 full-time staff with expertise in proposal development, grants management, monitoring and evaluation, as well as marketing and communications so that we can reach an even larger audience.

DFI currently uses the following performance indicators to measure progress toward impact goals:

• Number of K-12 students reached
• Number of teachers engaged
• Number of series developed
• Number of titles developed
• User testing reports where the key metrics are
  •  (1) % of educators that would use the video 
  •  (2) % of students who would share the video

Today’s students are exposed to easily accessible material which provides distorted information. Students often find greater stimulation from these sources rather than traditional teaching methods such as lectures and textbooks. DFI aims to disrupt the status quo by providing engaging, accessible, and factual learning content for use in both traditional classroom and out-of-school-time environments. 

Our interactive, two-minute videos fill this gap by stimulating critical thinking and discussion around unheralded figures and topics. Not only do these interactive videos provide viewers with a greater appreciation of US history, but they also provoke critical thinking and debate, both of which are integral for success in life. By producing these videos, in concert with providing teachers with supplemental material designed to lead the discussion and remove administrative burdens, we are not only inspiring the next generation of American history storytellers, but also providing the necessary soft skills that high schoolers need to thrive as they mature beyond the classroom.

DFI’s videos are built using open-source software that provides learners with quality content, free of charge.

At DFI, we work through a lens of equity and inclusion that emanates a respectful and caring community that embraces diversity and empowers everyone to learn and succeed at learning. By holding values of optimism, partnership, open innovation, human-centered solutions, and inclusive technology, we strive to uphold the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not only are all of our videos open-source and accessible to anyone, but we also intentionally feature unheralded Americans such as Marie van Brittan Brown, a black woman who is the inventor of the CCTV home security system, in our videos. By highlighting underappreciated BIPOC and women figures in American history, we hope to highlight the indispensable contributions they have made to the nation and beyond, in turn instilling an appreciation for history that goes beyond what is in the traditional textbook or lecture.

DFI’s model allows us to provide a unique impact to our target audience. Unlike peer organizations, DFI is strictly focused on American history, which enables us to do a deep dive into American history to uncover stories and people that other organizations might overlook.

Our videos are also different in that they are both shorter than the typical educational video and leave viewers with a question. DFI’s videos are two minutes each, while most peer videos are in the 5-15-minute range. Producing shorter videos gives us two advantages: (1) We are able retain the viewer’s attention, and as a result, (2) invite further discussion that is based on the premise of telling people how, rather than what, to think. DFI is the only one of its peer organizations to leave viewers with a discussion question at the end of each video which stimulates the critical thinking, dialogue, and fruitful debate that is needed to propel young people to success.

Over the next three years, we hope to expand both the number of partners as well as the scope of existing partnerships so that we can continue to increase demand for our videos and reach more students and teachers. DFI is also exploring revenue streams outside of traditional philanthropic sources, including by obtaining video licenses, joining the YouTube partner program, and developing content for historical societies and/or school districts. To do this, we will need to continue to build our operational capacity by hiring additional full-time staff with expertise in grant management, partnership development, and marketing and visibility. By investing in additional personnel and modernizing our database and marketing systems, we will expand our capacity to pursue funding from different revenue sources. 

DFI’s strategy to achieve financial sustainability includes the diversification of its funding portfolio through several key methods, including (1) increasing the number of proposals submitted, (2) leveraging the network of our board members, and (3) increasing speaking engagements. Over the past three months, we have submitted a range of proposals to funders with an interest in both the technology and education spaces. Similarly, DFI’s well-networked board members are leaders in the field of education and have worked at institutions including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Teachers College of Columbia University, and Philadelphia Public Schools. Third, as a leader in utilizing technology to educate students about American History, DFI has accumulated speaking fees from events such as the White House Historical Association’s Educators Conference in July 2021, where DFI’s Founder and CEO delivered the keynote speech.