Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

The old school bell at the Christiansburg Institute Museum frames one of the schools remaining buildings along Scattergood Drive in Christiansburg. Montgomery County history and social studies teachers learned about the local history of the institute through training made possible through the Teaching American History Grant.

The Teaching American History Grant

• Montgomery County Public Schools received a three-year federal grant in 2003
• Ten Virginia school districts received the grants that year
• MCPS partnered with Virginia Tech, Radford University and the Virginia Historical Society
• MCPS’s grant was for $648,000
• Thirty-eight K-12 MCPS teachers complete the program this year
• Roanoke City Public Schools received a similar three-year grant in 2005

BLACKSBURG -- When adults ask young people what they know of history, they frequently express shock at the answers they hear.

Montgomery County Public Schools hopes to change that.

For three years now, the district has been intensely training 38 of its history and social studies teachers in a partnership with Virginia Tech, Radford University and the Virginia Historical Society.

These K-12 teachers have in turn brought their expertise back to their classrooms and students.

"It's given me a much more in-depth knowledge of what I teach," Bonnie Cunningham, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Christiansburg Middle School, said after a July 18 presentation at the Inn at Virginia Tech on the Vietnam War.

The program, paid for by a $648,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education, ends this summer with two weeks of study on late 20th-century U.S. history and innovative methods for making history more relevant to today's children.

The teachers met the previous two summers and monthly since October 2003, said Melissa Lisanti, a doctoral student at Tech who is the grant coordinator.

Lisanti, who taught social studies at Christiansburg Middle School for six years, said this grant allowed for more options and depth in helping teachers stay current in their field than other types of professional development do.

During the session on Vietnam, middle school and high school teachers heard from Stephanie Van Hover of the University of Virginia about ways to engage students with photographs and recordings.

Van Hover directed them to www.whitehousetapes.org, a Web site where UVa scholars have posted recorded conversations of several presidents. The clips are specifically designed for teachers to use in classrooms.

Earlier that day, RU associate history professor Sharon Roger Hepburn talked with all the teachers about the civil rights era. Roger Hepburn gave another presentation to the group two years ago on the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

"I'm not teaching them things they already know," Roger Hepburn said. "They are really able to bring it back into the classroom. Hopefully, that will help the students that I get when they come through college."

In addition to national history, the teachers heard lectures on local history from the Christiansburg Institute and the Blacksburg Museum. Later this week, they will also take a field trip to Richmond to explore Virginia history.

The instructional information they create from the lectures and trips will be compiled into a database for all the district's social studies teachers to use.

"The presentations that we have received are of a high order," said Max Ballard, the social studies department chair at Eastern Montgomery High School. "Being able to meet with our colleagues at other schools is rare, and it's been really good."

The teachers have also had a chance to talk with colleagues who teach other grade levels.

Having teachers of kindergartners through 12th-graders in the same program helps to ensure that the social studies curriculum is sequential and complementary, wrote Jeanette Warwick, assistant superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, in an e-mail.

Though it was difficult at times to have teachers from different grade levels in the same room, one high school teacher said it was nice to hear the perspective of a kindergarten teacher, for example.

Warwick also wrote that the district will evaluate the effects of the grant program and that she hopes to find other ways and new funding to continue the work started with it.