The Knowledge Matters Podcast

Welcome to a special edition of the Knowledge Matters Podcast. This episode is a special bonus—an audio recording of our recent webinar, Literacy and the Science of Learning. It is a dynamic, hourlong conversation between three exciting experts in the field: Dylan Wiliam, Doug Lemov, and Natalie Wexler, facilitated by Kristen McQuillan of StandardsWork. In this webinar, the panel responds to listener questions based on the podcast season that shares the same title. They explore what hap...

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 L...

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. Effec...

In the typical American high school, 9th-grade history students are expected to dive into the historical content, grapple with complex ideas, and engage in deep inquiry. But teenage students often lack the historical knowledge such tasks require. If you haven’t learned much about the Civil War, for example, you won’t be ready to discuss whether the Compromise of 1877 was a fair deal. That’s one of the challenges described by this episode’s guest, Ebony McKiver, a curriculum expert and former ...

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 sequen...

Season 3 Episode 6 | “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...

Season 3 Episode 4 | “The book is in a death struggle with electronic and social media. And right now, it’s losing.” Host Doug Lemov makes a spirited case for reading whole books in the classroom—especially since today’s students read almost no books outside of school. He’s joined by guests Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week and cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham and speaks with two Texas educators using whole books in their school. “Learning to be able to struggle—to read a challen...

Season 3 Episode 2 | Our memories grow stronger when we work to retrieve them. That’s why flash cards and pop quizzes are effective: they prompt students to recall and access information from their memory bank. What other instructional tools and techniques help students remember what they’ve learned, and how can teachers put these to use? Host Dylan Wiliam takes a deep dive into four vitally important principles that are rooted in cognitive science and receive far less attention than the...

How is the Science of Reading connected to the Science of Learning? Join hosts Dylan Wiliam, Doug Lemov, and Natalie Wexler as they delve into the links between the two, both in theory and practice, in Season 3 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast. Across six 30-minute episodes, we’ll explore how long-term memory shapes reading comprehension, why reading whole books is better than excerpts on a screen, and how teaching students to write clearly can help them think more clearly, in conversation wi...

Today’s episode is a special bonus—an audio recording of our recent webinar, Knowledge: Why It Matters. We found the conversation so valuable that we wanted to make it accessible in as many ways as possible. In this episode, StandardsWork’s Chief Program Officer Kristen McQuillan and Baltimore City Public Schools teacher Kyair Butts join Dr. Susan Neuman (New York University) and Dr. Margaret “Moddy” McKeown (University of Pittsburgh) to explore how content knowledge plays a critical role in ...

Season 2 Episode 5 | Have you ever read something and then realized you didn’t totally understand it? That’s the hallmark of a challenging text, and it’s something students encounter all the time. In this episode, David and Meredith Liben discuss three ways to connect students with sophisticated texts, even if they can’t yet read or comprehend them on their own: juicy sentences, explain your answer, and structured journaling. First, linguist and language scholar Lily Wong Fillmore shares...

Season 2 Episode 3 | When’s the last time you finished a chapter of a book and thought, “Hmmm, what was the main idea?” Competent readers don’t ask themselves this question. They’re too busy focusing on the text itself, not the component strategies that help us understand them. But that’s not how traditional curriculum and instructional practices work. Instead, they teach reading through a strategy-first approach that focuses on skills like making inferences and predictions, not th...

Season 2 Episode 1 | In today’s reading classrooms, too many kids are not alright. One of the biggest challenges is comprehension–or rather, its absence. Students don't understand what they read well enough to think deeply, connect what they are learning to the wider world, and prepare for the futures they want. On this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben break down reading comprehension: they explain what it is and how it works in the mind of the reader, based on cognitive sci...