Research projects

Teaching Reasoning and Inquiry Project in Social Studies (TRIPSS): Read.Inquire.Write. Curriculum Development

Read. Inquire. Write. uses inquiry and investigation to support the development of low-achieving readers' and English learners' content knowledge, reading comprehension, analytical thinking, and argument writing in diverse classrooms. The Read.Inquire.Write curriculum provides investigations on a range of topics taught in middle school social studies alongside disciplinary literacy tools and writing assignments that connect past and present and offer a more authentic purpose and audience than traditional 5-paragraph essays. This project was generously funded by the Teaching with Primary Sources Midwest Region Grant and Teaching with Primary Sources Grant from the Library of Congress as well as the Braitmayer Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

Collaborator: Mary Schleppegrell, Co-PI.

TeachingWorks Teacher Preparation Transformation Center Project

This project, led by Deborah Ball (PI), is a collaboration between University of Michigan’s TeachingWorks and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Teacher Preparation Transformation Center Initiative to develop and promote a common threshold for beginning teaching. This includes equipping and supporting novice teachers with a set of high leverage practices, specialized subject matter understanding, and professional knowledge for skillful teaching. Monte-Sano supports the project by developing resources for teacher educators to use as they prepare beginning history/social science teachers to enact high-leverage instructional practices that are consequential for all students' learning. See the TeachingWorks Resource Library for more information and teacher education resources.

Core Practice Consortium

The Core Practice Consortium (CPC) is a collaboration among faculty across the country working to support teacher education programs in preparing novice teachers to enact instructional practices that are crucial to supporting student learning and disrupting inequities. The CPC aims to identify the core practices that matter for all students' learning, develop and research teacher education pedagogies that engage novices in these practices, and to improve of the field of teacher education in preparing novices to teach toward equity. The CPC is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in addition to a grant from the Center for Research on Learning & Teaching at the University of Michigan.

Collaborators: Pam Grossman and Megan Franke, PIs (full list of collaborators here)

Engaging the Archives

This project supports the development of learning experiences for University of Michigan undergraduates in using primary historical sources, while fostering engaged collaborations between faculty across U-M's campus and archivists at the Bentley Historical Library. Funded by both U-M's Third Century Initiative and the M-Cubed program, this project also researches the practices of faculty, archivists, and students while working with primary, archival sources to develop best practices for student success in college-level teaching with primary sources. Monte-Sano serves as a Faculty Fellow and advisor the Bentley Historical Library for this project.

Collaborators: Terry McDonald, Beth Yakel, Nancy Bartlett, and Cinda Nofgizer

Historical Writing Project

Through their writing, historians shed light on the present and the past. This project investigated the types of writing professional historians engage in, with attention to the many purposes and audiences for their arguments, their writing processes, and their ideas about good historical writing. The in-depth interviews conducted with historians allowed for the development of authentic historical writing tasks for middle school students as well as supports for students' writing process, much of which is now featured on the Read.Inquire.Write website. This work was funded by both the Braitmayer Foundation and Spencer Foundation.

Disciplinary Writing Instruction for the Social Studies Classroom

This three-year project—which ended in 2013—was a partnership between Prince George's County Public Schools, Monte-Sano and faculty colleagues Susan De La Paz, Mark Felton, and Robert Croninger focused on the development and implementation of a discipline-based reading and writing curriculum in U.S. history with African American and Latino 8th graders and their teachers. Funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, the project led to the creation of a historical inquiry curriculum that allowed students with diverse academic and literacy skills to analyze historical texts and write arguments based on documentary evidence. The curriculum is available in Reading, Thinking, and Writing About History: Teaching Argument Writing to Diverse Learners in the Common Core Classroom, Grades 6-12, published by Teachers' College Press.

Collaborators: Susan De La Paz, PI, and Mark Felton, Co-PI

Learning to Teach Historical Reading, Thinking, and Writing

This project examined how novice teachers learn to teach the critical thinking, reading, and writing that are the hallmarks of disciplinary literacy in history/social science. Monte-Sano followed six social studies teachers over three years through their preservice teacher education programs and into their classrooms during their first two years of teaching. She found that the teachers conveyed different notions of history through their instruction and approached writing instruction differently despite their similar teacher preparation. This project was funded by the Spencer Foundation.