Season Two, Episode 6: The Knowledge Rich Classroom of Laura Stam
About this episode
Laura Stam discusses how to create a knowledge-rich classroom through interactive and precise teaching methods.
Summary In this episode of Chalk Dust , Rebecca Birch and Dr Nathaniel Swain are joined by Laura Stam, a third grade teacher in Wyoming, writer of The Knowledge Exchange on Substack, 2024–2025 Goyen Fellow, and founding board member of The Reading League Wyoming. Laura takes us inside a knowledge-rich history lesson on the earliest Native American peoples of North America, with a particular focus on the Arapaho and Shoshone peoples of Wyoming. The episode explores how a text-based lesson can be highly interactive, precise, and content-rich without becoming fragmented. Using a knowledge organiser, document camera, shared reading, choral responses, pair shares, sentence stems, and a co-constructed Venn diagram, Laura shows how students can build deep knowledge while also practising reading, speaking, listening, and writing. The conversation highlights how explicit teaching can remain flexible and responsive when the content itself drives the lesson. Across the episode, Rebecca and Nathaniel unpack the small moves that make the lesson work: high participation, full sentence responses, careful questioning, purposeful pauses, and frequent opportunities for students to rehearse and…
More episodes of Chalk Dust
- Season Two, Episode 10: Professor Anna Stokke on Effective and Engaging Math(s) Instruction
- Season Two, Episode 9: Every Class is a Reading Class
- Season Two, Episode 8: Getting Hands-On
- Season Two, Episode 7: Everyone can learn mathematics with John Mighton
- Season Two, Episode 5: The choreography of learning
- Season Two, Episode 4: The power of precision
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