Welcome to the brand-new History Matters Podcast. I’m your host, Barbara Davidson, President of StandardsWork and Executive Director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign.

This podcast was born out of a vision—one I believe all educators have—of inspiring our students to ask big questions, develop their love of learning through reading, and feel empowered to go out and explore their community and the world.

We believe great history education can be a spark that causes this to happen. The History Matters Podcast will explore how it’s done.

We decided to launch the podcast because, while the national conversation about the science of reading is growing, the role of content knowledge in reading is still woefully understated. We’re also concerned that much of the interest in civics education is ignoring the groundwork that must be laid in the elementary grades.

I hope this podcast will show you how history serves both literacy and civic goals, and how some ground-breaking work, and practicing educators, are out there, right now, getting it done!

Welcome to the History Matters Podcast: Season 1.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

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.

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.

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.

In Medford, Massachusetts, “social studies is a subject to be valued,” fifth-grade teacher Jennifer Lindsey explains in this episode. “It’s the place to teach kids how to talk to each other and negotiate conversations and digest information and form an opinion—but also listen to others’ opinions and back that up with evidence,” she says.

This content-rich, inquiry-based learning is powered by Investigating History, a new, free social studies curriculum developed by Massachusetts teachers, scholars, and the state education department. It’s aligned to state standards and is available for grades 5–7; a pilot of grades 3–4 is underway.

Lindsey describes the “resource gap” of the past: either textbooks from 1992 or materials from the Internet, much of which is intended for teenage students. The state-developed curriculum is designed to build knowledge and literacy and critical-thinking skills in young students and works within a daily 30-minute timeslot, she tells host Barbara Davidson.

“Three core routines—a supporting question launch, an investigating sources routine, and a putting it together routine—really set kids up nicely to learn some solid informational texts and written and oral discourse skills because they are starting from a place of curiosity,” she says. “And in my literacy block, I’m teaching kids how to ask questions to keep themselves engaged and how to clarify ideas by asking questions. Those two things go hand-in-hand.”

The curriculum also is designed to support teachers with their content knowledge and provide guidance for challenging questions and conversations, Lindsay says. In one lesson, fifth-grade students are tasked with advising the president on a major decision, such as whether to declare war on Great Britain in 1812. They research the options and present their advice to the class—and often disagree with what actually happened.

“Fifth graders are talking about foreign policy and it will blow your mind,” she says. “Tiny humans can have the hard conversations.”

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.

What do teachers need to successfully teach high-quality history lessons in elementary school?

A strong curriculum is a great start, but teachers also need aligned professional learning and time to dig in and build the content knowledge that supports confident instruction, says guest Courtney Dumas. In this episode, she explains how her organization, Edu20/20, is supporting Louisiana educators as they implement the state’s content-rich Bayou Bridges elementary social studies curriculum.

Effective professional learning for social studies instruction is rooted in curriculum, but it doesn’t just cover how the curriculum works, she says. Dumas and Edu20/20 discuss specific content in detail and then lead model lessons where teachers pretend to be fifth graders, which allows them to experience the curriculum as their students will.

“Professional learning in social studies is different because the No. 1 thing is the content,” she says. “In Ouachita, we talked about their grade level, their specific content, their specific units, their specific assessments. And then we had them experience a lesson as a student. And that was kind of where the magic happens.”

Dumas also stresses the importance of giving teachers time to study history content together. Many elementary teachers are generalists, so building historical content knowledge is an important aspect of effective professional learning in social studies, she notes.

“We set lots of high expectations for curriculum, but sometimes we don’t give teachers the time and space to meet those expectations,” she says. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t know basic history. . . It is so important that we give teachers the time and space to interact with that content.”

Dumas sees a bright future for elementary history instruction, because “people are understanding the importance of it and how it complements literacy,” she says.

“We think that by giving more time to ELA, that’s going to be the answer. But really, social studies is ELA,” she says. “It’s going to make them better writers, better readers, better citizens. That’s what we want.”

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.

Many teachers build history lessons on primary sources like letters and legal documents. But without context and historical thinking skills, students can’t make much meaning from them, say guests Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman, co-founders of the Four Question Method for history instruction.

“Primary sources, for us, are ways to practice doing what historians do. 8th graders aren't historians, 12th graders aren't historians. So it’s the silly mistake that says, we need to do exactly what the experts do so that we become experts. We actually need to do what the experts did before they were experts so that they became experts, which means learn a lot of stories,” Shiffman says.

“One of our slogans is ‘Story First’. And everything flows from that,” Bassett tells host Barbara Davidson.

In the Four Question Method, history is taught as a series of narratives and events are explored in a coherent, chronological way. Question One is simply, “What happened?” In other words, what’s the story? Question Two is “What were they thinking?” and helps students understand and interpret the perspectives of people involved in the story.

Question Three is “Why then and there?” which targets explanation as a skill. For example, students studying the American Revolution can contrast the Canadian colonies, which stayed with Great Britain, with the 13 colonies that went to war.

“That asks kids to think in a more sophisticated way about the specific story and say, ‘Wow, stories like this, they happen sometimes and not others. Why then? Why there?’” Shiffman says.

Question Four is “What do we think about that?” and develops judgment, which Shiffman defines as “the capacity to generalize from your specific reaction to a case and to say, ‘Hold on. What are the general features of this case? And how can I make a rule to guide my own behavior in the world so that I know when to support the revolution and when not to?’ ”

Bassett and Shiffman describe visiting a Tennessee classroom using a 4QM elementary history unit where students were learning about the decision of a Lakota Sioux leader to surrender the U.S. Army.

“The kids in the room, they knew a lot. They knew the story, they knew about this guy, and they got to deliberate toward judgment about whether Chief Joseph made the right choice or not. They can do that in fourth and fifth grade, absolutely,” Shiffman says.

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.

In Thermopolis, Wyoming, second-grade students love learning about the War of 1812, from the swashbuckling sea battles off the coast of Louisiana to the bombardment at Maryland’s Fort McHenry that inspired the “Star-Spangled Banner”—engaging lessons that build knowledge alongside literary and historical thinking skills.

This type of learning is powered by a strong, coherent curriculum that ensures learning connects from unit to unit and year to year, says teacher Laura Stam, a 2024–25 Goyen Literacy Fellow who writes about the sciences of reading and learning on her Substack, The Knowledge Exchange. “As soon as we start teaching it, teachers talk about how excited their students are,” she says.

In this final episode of the first season of the History Matters Podcast, Stam also explains that such curriculum helps bridge gaps in elementary teachers’ historical content knowledge. In elementary classrooms, building content expertise is a challenge because “we’re teaching all of the subjects,” she says. Strong curriculum is a sound starting point for teachers to build the knowledge they need to confidently teach history. And rather than curating content, teachers can focus on delivering instruction and connecting history lessons to art and culture.

“A really good curriculum brings in not just that history, but brings in all of the cultural pieces attached to it, the art and the poetry and the music that really enrich that knowledge,” she says. “If a really good curriculum has all those pieces built in for you, you just get to be the expert and deliver that, be the artist that delivers that for your students without having to curate it all yourself.”

Stam also describes how her students’ curiosity about historical topics extends beyond classroom instruction. Parents have shared stories of students connecting family vacations to history lessons about the Underground Railroad, for example, and Stam has overheard young students debating the relative merits of living in modern times versus the ancient Indus Valley Civilization while watching a local basketball game.

“They’ll go home and they want to explore their own interests,” she says. “They are getting books and looking on the Internet and finding out more information on their own topics that may not necessarily be what we learned in school. It’s interesting. It’s inspiring to know that they can learn about these things on their own. That’s the end goal, right? We want to teach them to be their own learners.”

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.