What Makes Great Elementary History Curriculum with Sean Dimond | History Matters Podcast

Hello listeners of the Knowledge Matters Podcast! We're thrilled to welcome you to the first season of our new series, the History Matters Podcast. 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. In this inaugural season, we explore the vast untapped potential of high-quality history instruction to build knowledge, accelerate literacy, and prepare students to participate in civic life. Enjoy!

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S1E2: What Makes Great Elementary History Curriculum with Sean Dimond | 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. And 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. 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 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.