In the 2024-2025 school year, Lois MacMillan teaches American history and AP Government and Politics at Grants Pass High School in Grants Pass, Oregon. She has greatly enjoyed teaching World history and an elective on the American Civil War in the past, however in her thirty-three years of teaching, she has greatly enjoyed teaching all levels including the elementary and middle school levels.  

 

After earning her National Board Certification in Early Adolescence-Social Studies, "Ms. Mac" won Oregon’s 2006 History Teacher of the Year and 2014 Oregon’s Civic Teacher Award for a student project on Oregon’s fallen soldiers since 9/11. In 2018 she won Grammy Museum’s Jane Ortner Award for incorporating music in the non-music classroom. In the fall of 2018, she took a one-year sabbatical in New York City where she worked with Title I high school teachers and students in fourteen cities around the country on Founding Era curriculum culminating in their attendance to the Broadway show, Hamilton. In 2021, she was named James Madison Fellowship Foundation's Fellows' Fellow and Southern Oregon Teacher of the Year. In 2024, MacMillan was awarded Organization of American Historian Mary K. Tachau Award "in recognition of the contributions made by precollegiate teachers to improve history education within the field of American history" and National Teacher of the Year from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

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For more than a decade, she has served as a Master Teacher for over thirty summer seminars where she has been paired with different American historians from different universities from around the country and teaches pedagogy applicable to various historical periods. She also serves as a teacher advisor for the National Constitution Center, National Council of History Education, Council on Foreign Relations, Oregon Council of Social Studies, and Retro Report.