Teaching with Laurel Grove School Laurel Grove is a one-room
school house in Northern Virginia. In the 1990s, a community
team successfully blocked a developer's bulldozer, formed the
Laurel Grove School Association, and restored the one room
schoolhouse. An interdisciplinary team of community members,
curriculum experts, teachers, historians, and museum curators
recovered the history of the school from oral histories and
local archives, refurbished the classroom, and crafted a history
curriculum to teach slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and
life under Jim Crow. Today the school is a museum along the
African-American heritage trail. Six lesson plans (scaffolded
for K-12) focus on understanding racial issues in Virginia from
1800 through the 1930s, on working with primary sources, and
with an emphasis on critical thinking skills. Essays fill in the
historical background including Slavery and Free Negroes,
1800-1860, A Look at Virginians During Reconstruction, The
Impact of the Jim Crow Era on Education,