The Knowledge Matters Podcast

• The Power of Historical Knowledge | History Matters Podcast

  The more history young students know, the more they want to know. That’s one of the joyful discoveries that elementary teachers are making in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. In this episode, guests Angela Barfoot and Lauren Cascio describe the rewards of using Bayou Bridges, a content-rich, knowledge-building social studies curriculum, in combination with a high-quality ELA curriculum, Louisiana Guidebooks.Extensive teacher notes, rich texts, engaging visuals, and tie-ins to virtual field trips make for exciting history study in the elementary grades, the teachers tell host Barbara Davidson. For example, after studying Native American communities in class, students visited the nearby Poverty Point World Heritage Site and were cheering with excitement on the bus, Barfoot says.“We’re not even there yet, and the kids start screaming, ‘The bird mound! Mound A!’ And they’re just—they can see it and they are just thrilled out of their minds. . . they were just beyond thrilled that they knew all this!”Students are also choosing to read about historical topics at the school library, Cascio reports. They are reaching for historical fiction and non-fiction texts about what they’ve learned in social studies.“Fifth graders love a fact,” she says. “It excites me because I want them to read different genres, and because that’s part of what I need them to do.”Learning about different people, places, and times is enriching in multiple ways. Between knowledge-building instruction and engaging texts in their social studies and ELA curricula, students are being shown “a world that they’ve never seen before,” Cascio says.“It is teaching them to think,” Barfoot says. “And to not take things at face value, but to really dive deep.”Ouachita Parish was recently featured by the Knowledge Matters School Tour; visit our website for more information, including videos of lessons and interviews with students and teachers.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

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• What Makes Great Elementary History Curriculum | History Matters Podcast

  Teaching history involves balance: too many facts and it’s boring, too few and students don’t have enough information to make sense of what they’ve learned. In this episode, host Barbara Davidson speaks with Sean Dimond, a former middle-school teacher and Louisiana state social studies director who is now senior social studies editor at the Core Knowledge Foundation.Dimond notes that in elementary school, history is often “a random collection of holidays,” with topics presented out of sequence and scant connection from one to the next. That’s not what’s happening in Louisiana, where students and teachers are joyfully engaged in a high-quality, knowledge-building history curriculum. Dimond recalls his early struggles as a social studies teacher following vast and vague state standards. “In sixth grade, we were basically expected to cover all—and I’m not really exaggerating here—of human history,” he recalls. The standards started with the Stone Age and extended through the late Renaissance, following a “broken sequence with no narrative,” he says.That’s no longer the case: Louisiana created, adopted, and is implementing the high-quality Bayou Bridges curriculum. Now, “the material moves generally chronologically and sort of spirals, so students return again to similar topics at a deeper and deeper level,” he says. Dimond shares the example of an exciting lesson from a Civil War unit that combines expository, vocabulary-building text with a variety of primary sources, includes excerpts of presidential speeches, and culminates in a classwide debate about Lincoln’s heroism.Such curriculum and instruction build literacy and historical thinking skills, but “content is king,” Dimond asserts. “My ability to make an excellent claim about the Antebellum South is pretty predicated on my specific knowledge about the Antebellum South.”This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

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• A Case for Teaching History in Elementary School | History Matters Podcast

  Elementary schools spend almost no time teaching history. How did we get here, and how can we reprioritize this crucial foundation for literacy and knowledge? Host Barbara Davidson begins the eight-part “History Matters” podcast with a reflective and forward-looking conversation with guest Robert Pondiscio, an author and former fifth-grade teacher who founded the Knowledge Matters Campaign.Pondiscio recalls his youthful passion for history, sparked by the nation’s bicentennial celebrations nearly 50 years ago. As a teacher, he found his students had learned very little about the past. Rather than learn facts, administrators wanted students to grapple with “essential questions”—which Pondiscio notes is impossible without the knowledge to understand them. Later, federal accountability rules prompted schools across the country to overwhelmingly focus on tested subjects. But reading is more than decoding—it is comprehension. Without background knowledge, students cannot make sense of what they read. “Everything was reading, reading, reading, math, math, math,” he says. “That’s just not how you build a reader.”Historical knowledge is especially powerful: Pondiscio notes that the nation’s founders recognized that a republic is fragile and needs virtuous, educated citizens to maintain it. Davidson asks: If you had a magic wand, what would you do? Pondiscio sets forth two big changes. First, that every school use knowledge-building curriculum. Second, that representatives from every state and district decide what basic, foundational historical knowledge kids should learn in each elementary grade:“What is it we expect kids to know to be literate, to be competent citizens, to be engaged, to be excited in participating and playing a part in the American experiment? I’d love to see schools take up that challenge.”This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

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• Natalie Wexler on How Writing Promotes Clear Thinking | Literacy and the Science of Learning

  “Teaching students to write clearly was actually teaching them to think clearly.” In the Season 3 finale, host Natalie Wexler brings listeners inside Monroe City Schools, a high-poverty Louisiana district where educators have paired a content-rich curriculum with explicit writing instruction. This combination has not only helped students become fluent writers but also expanded their ability  to understand complex content and think analytically.For writing instruction to work, the curriculum needs to dive deeply into specific topics. “It’s hard to build a complex paragraph and sentence structure around something that’s a relatively simple idea. You're able to use those higher-leverage strategies when the content gives you something to work with,” explains the district’s former chief academic officer, Serena White.Monroe City Schools had been using the content-rich Louisiana Guidebooks curriculum for several years, and many students were able to understand lessons, read the texts, and participate in class discussions. But writing was a different story: “when it came down to actually composing and expository writing, they struggled greatly. . . Many times they just wouldn’t put anything,” White explains.In 2017, she came across The Writing Revolution, a guide to an explicit method of writing instruction grounded in cognitive science. Wexler co-authored the book and is on the advisory board of the organization that provides training in the method. It has three crucial characteristics, Wexler explains.First, writing activities are embedded in the content of the curriculum, across subject areas. Second, grammar and rules of syntax are taught in the context of students’ own writing. And third, the heavy cognitive load that writing imposes is lightened so that students can enjoy the potential cognitive benefits of writing, like retrieval practice and elaboration. After the district adopted the method, teachers began to see changes for all students, including those who struggled the most. Students were writing in complete sentences, outlining and drafting coherent essays, and tackling written responses on standardized tests with confidence, says teacher Tamla South. Teacher Justin Overacker adds:“You’re helping students write with clarity and with purpose and confidence across disciplines. And let's be real: these are skills that are very essential for college and career and life.”Like most educators, those in Monroe weren’t familiar with cognitive science. They just wanted to teach their kids how to write. Their experience shows that even if teachers haven’t learned about concepts like retrieval practice, they can provide their students with all the benefits of science-informed instruction—and equip them for success in school and beyond—by adopting an explicit, carefully sequenced method of writing instruction.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

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• Natalie Wexler on Memory and the Writing Effect | Literacy and the Science of Learning

  Writing is hard—and teaching writing is even harder. But science tells us it’s well worth the effort, because writing flexes the mental muscles that nurture literacy and learning.Host Natalie Wexler connects cognitive science to specific writing practices that transfer information from working to long-term memory and require students to retrieve and elaborate on that information. She’s joined by psychologists John Sweller and Jeffrey Karpicke, whose research has identified effective instructional and academic strategies for teaching, learning, and lightening students’ cognitive loads.“Writing isn't just a product—it’s part of the process of learning. In fact, evidence shows that having students write about what they’re learning can result in dramatic cognitive benefits,” Wexler says.Learning and putting new information to use is a two-way process: students must first transfer new information from working to long-term memory. Then they must be able to remember that information by retrieving it from their memory stores. Writing supports both. Karpicke describes an experiment in which college students read science texts in different conditions. Compared to students who read the text once, twice or created a concept map, students who read the text once and then wrote down everything they remembered, recalled significantly more about the topic a week later. Many studies have found the same result: writing boosts memory. But not all writing has the same impact. Writing prompts that require elaboration, such as “how” or “why” questions, help expand and strengthen understanding by drawing new connections to the material. And writing is not equally effective for all students. Inexperienced writers can be so cognitively overwhelmed by the task of writing that it actually impedes learning.Wexler explains how teachers can ease the cognitive burden on students who are learning to write. First, they can ask students to write about content they've already learned about, so they don’t have to juggle new information in working memory along with the cognitive demands of writing. That approach also helps deepen students’ knowledge of curriculum content.Sweller describes how teachers also can provide opportunities for “deliberate practice,” which can make foundational literacy skills automatic. For example, students who have mastered spelling rules don’t have to think about spelling when they write. Higher-order writing skills never become completely automatic, but practice helps. For example, students who practice distinguishing between complete sentences and fragments, with feedback from a teacher, eventually “develop a gut sense of what makes a sentence a sentence,” Wexler notes.These processes work together to enhance student writing—which accelerates literacy and knowledge—not as an end-product, but an active part of the learning process.This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

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