• Professional Development

    Our asynchronous professional development programming is intended for middle, high, and home school educators seeking to cultivate higher levels of civic competency as a means of creating a patriotic and engaged American citizenry. Our approach to professional development is informed by the best practices of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and guided by the requirements of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ summer seminars. We offer a mix of asynchronous digital courses featuring engaging lectures (as those below) that provide educators with the knowledge and tools necessary to make a compelling moral case for our way of life by explaining why our free-market democracy is a highly evolved system of cooperation made robust by our constitutional democratic republic. We also provide in-person workshops and seminars for educators, fostering a peer network embracing the Big Civics approach. You can check out the Cooperation Civics Bootcamp here.

The Dawn of Cooperation

Today our free-market democracy and constitutional republic facilitates the greatest scale and scope of cooperation ever achieved by humans. To fully appreciate how our way of life works, we must understand cooperation. We’ll begin our story about cooperation with a simple example from prehistory that will help us think more carefully about cooperation and the economic forces that govern it. (Video originally produced as part of the American Civics Project of the Common Sense Society.)

The Dawn of Exchange

Few people realize that the rise of civilization occurred hand in hand with the evolution of markets that mediate exchange behavior. As markets grew, people exchanged goods with greater numbers of other people, including complete strangers they might never see again. Markets therefore helped launch civilization by first civilizing us as individuals. Those who could get along well with others, including others unlike them, were able to exchange the goods they had for prized goods from faraway places. But to tell this story properly it’s important to understand the foundations of exchange, including how it helped make us human.  (Video originally produced as part of the American Civics Project of the Common Sense Society.)

Capital in Hunter-Gatherer Bands

The concept of capital is important for understanding how large political-economic systems work, how and why they came into existence, and the rise of ideas that ultimately made possible the massive societies we went on to build. By getting better at making capital, we got better at almost everything else. We’ll now begin our story about capital by defining it clearly and then thinking carefully about how it evolved. (Video originally produced as part of the American Civics Project of the Common Sense Society.)

The Backstory of the U.S. Constitution

The U.S. Constitution is one of the most important documents ever written. But a common misconception is that it gave Americans the rights and freedoms we now hold dear. In reality, colonial citizens already enjoyed many of our most cherished rights and freedoms. A proper treatment of the U.S. Constitution should therefore begin before 1788 or even 1776. It should begin by exploring what ultimately produced the extraordinary level of liberty that was already enjoyed by American colonists. So we now turn to the story of how free-thinking minds likely emerged in the West, ultimately leading the framers to write a constitution to protect, promote, and expand the condition of liberty that already existed in America. (Video originally produced as part of the American Civics Project of the Common Sense Society.)