Join the Knowledge Matters Campaign in this thought-provoking and engaging exploration of the vital role of knowledge-building in education. Each season delves into pressing issues, innovative ideas, and transformative solutions. It’s a must-listen for educators, administrators, parents, and anyone with an interest in the evolving landscape of learning.
Last refreshed: ⓘ
Follow this podcast in the Metacast mobile app to refresh it and see new episodes.
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more
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 happens in t...
Thirteen colonies rose up, rebelled against an Empire, and won their independence. These unlikely victors built a new nation on democratic principles that inspired similar movements around the world. How should we tell the story of our nation’s founding? Guests Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt , who co-directed The American Revolution with Ken Burns, explain how chronology and characters shape their longform PBS documentaries and accompanying curriculum materials, in a bonus episode of the Histo...
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 Lit...
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 exp...
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. Effect...
In Medway, 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, scholar...
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 hi...
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 ma...
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...
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 nea...
This episode explores how Monroe City Schools, a high-poverty Louisiana district, revolutionized student learning by implementing "The Writing Revolution." By embedding explicit writing instruction within a content-rich curriculum, educators not only improved students' writing fluency but also enhanced their critical thinking, reading comprehension, and overall academic confidence. The method, grounded in cognitive science, helps lighten the cognitive load of writing, allowing students to deepen their knowledge and grapple with complex ideas across all subjects.
Host Natalie Wexler connects cognitive science to effective writing practices, emphasizing that writing is not just a product but a crucial learning process. She discusses how writing boosts long-term memory, improves comprehension through elaboration and syntactic understanding, and outlines strategies like deliberate practice and writing about known content to mitigate cognitive load, particularly for inexperienced writers. Psychologists John Sweller and Jeffrey Karpicke provide research insights into these methods, including "The Writing Revolution."
Doug Lemov makes a compelling case for re-emphasizing whole books in education, countering the decline in sustained reading among students. Guests Stephen Sawchuk and Daniel Willingham explain how books develop attention span, provide richer narrative experiences, and are neurologically privileged for memory and understanding. The episode showcases how whole books cultivate long-form reflective thinking, cultural literacy, and foster powerful classroom communities, as demonstrated by educators in Texas.
Season 3 Episode 3 | When we read fluently, we recognize words without effort. We also maintain an engaged pace (automaticity) and perceive expression (prosody), all of which support attention and leave working memory free to make meaning from a text. This is a complex achievement, and many students have fractured attention spans. What can educators do to account for interruptions and focus on building fluency, which is key to developing comprehension? Host Doug Lemov looks at the science of how...
Host Dylan Wiliam, along with guests Patrice Bain and Zach Groshell, delves into four crucial cognitive science principles: retrieval, spacing, metacognition, and interleaving. They discuss how these "power tools" build stronger memories, contrasting effective practices like self-testing with less effective methods like re-reading. The episode provides educators with actionable classroom strategies, from brain dumps to mini-whiteboards, emphasizing that active recall and distributed practice are key to lasting knowledge and student motivation.
Season 3 Episode 1 | How can schools and teachers maximize student learning? To answer this question, we need to understand how the human mind works. What needs to be explicitly taught, how many new things can we remember at a time, and what is the role of background knowledge in easing students’ cognitive loads? Host Dylan Wiliam begins the six-part “Literacy and the Science of Learning” podcast with an accessible overview of cognitive and educational psychology, in conversation with experts Da...
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 with ...
This bonus episode is an audio recording of our most popular webinar ever, Writing: An Unsung Hero of Reading Comprehension. It features familiar voices to listeners of Season 1 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, best-selling author and host Natalie Wexler, as well as StandardsWork’s Chief Program Officer Kristen McQuillan, Doug Lemov ( Teach Like a Champion ), and Julia Cooper (SchoolKit). Their conversation focuses on why writing should be connected to content learning. How does the act of writ...
This webinar discusses the pivotal role of content knowledge in reading comprehension, contrasting it with the limitations of standalone reading strategies. Experts Dr. Susan Neuman and Dr. Margaret McKeown, alongside Kristen McQuillan and Kyair Butts, delve into various types of knowledge (linguistic, cultural, experiential) and the importance of text-driven, knowledge-building activities. The conversation emphasizes that an integrated, coherent curriculum is key to fostering equitable and deep engagement with texts, helping all students become confident, skilled readers.
Season 2 Episode 6 | Explorers boldly venture into unfamiliar worlds, where confidence, curiosity, knowledge, and persistence are rewarded. When students approach texts like explorers, they bring these same qualities to the task—a mindset cognitive scientists call the “standard of coherence.” Such reading is purposeful, engaging, and expands the reader’s horizons. Reading anywhere, anytime is not just doable. It’s joyful. In this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben discuss the key ingredient...
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 the ori...
Season 2 Episode 4 | How do actual teachers and students “center the text” in reading classrooms? In this episode, David and Meredith Liben get specific with teachers and experts about how read alouds and close reading can connect students of all ages and literacy levels to a text—and to one another. Two ideas animate the discussion. First, theory is not terribly helpful without practice. And second, learning to read is (and should be!) a social experience. First, the Libens explore the power of...
David and Meredith Liben, joined by literacy expert Margaret McKeown and teacher Sean Morrissey, critically examine the pervasive "strategy-first" approach in reading instruction, arguing it's often ineffective and even damaging. They highlight how teaching discrete comprehension skills like making inferences, rather than focusing on the text itself, creates inauthentic exercises and fails to foster deep understanding. The conversation shifts to solutions, emphasizing the importance of foundational skills, vocabulary, extensive reading for knowledge building, and developing a "standard of coherence" where readers expect and work to make sense of text. Morrissey's firsthand account of piloting curricula vividly illustrates the stark differences between knowledge-rich and strategy-driven programs.
Season 2 Episode 2 | Imagine reading a story about a trial, but not knowing the meaning of “indicted” or “exonerated.” Without a lot of determination and a dictionary, you’d be lost. The knowledge and vocabulary readers bring to a text substantially determine how readily they comprehend it–a fact that’s just as relevant in ELA as it is in social studies and science class. In this episode, David and Meredith Liben walk us through the relevant research and talk with three teachers whose innovative...
In this episode, hosts David and Meredith Liben address the critical issue of reading comprehension, explaining its cognitive science basis. They challenge traditional comprehension strategies, arguing for a text-centered approach as envisioned by cognitive psychologist Walter Kinch's three-level model of comprehension. Guests Margaret McKeown and Rachel Stack further illustrate how deep engagement with text and relevant prior knowledge build lasting understanding, rather than generic strategies. The discussion concludes with insights for school leaders on implementing effective, text-driven instruction.
Season 2 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast is here! Teachers and reading experts David and Meredith Liben host “Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension,” a six-part podcast series based on their book of the same name . With their signature charm and straight talk, David and Meredith take on an urgent problem in American schools today—kids not understanding what they read—and how reading comprehension can be taught more effectively. Over six digestible episodes, David and Meredith explore how compre...
Season 1 Episode 6 | “Think what a better society we’ll have” | American education has a number of serious problems – and our failure to start building kids' knowledge early is a fundamental one. By now you know that reading comprehension is complicated and as you’ll hear, so is the explanation for what has gone wrong with the way American schools have approached it. In the sixth and final episode of " The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited ", Natalie will explain how we ...
Hear from two pioneering administrators, Brent Conway and Dr. LaTonya Goffney, as they recount their experiences leading a district-wide transition to a knowledge-building approach for reading comprehension. They detail their motivations, including personal connections to literacy struggles and alarming student data, and the significant challenges faced, from teacher skepticism to implementing new curricula during a pandemic. The episode highlights the crucial role of leadership in orchestrating systemic change, changing schedules, and fostering a shared understanding of why a shift away from isolated skill practice is essential for deep student learning and equitable outcomes.
Season 1 Episode 4 | “Now they had something to write about” | In the last episode of " The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited ", you heard from three teachers – Abby, Deloris, and Kyair – who talked about their experiences using some of the knowledge-building literacy curricula that have recently been developed. In Episode 4, you’ll hear from them again, and you’ll meet Cassidy Burns, a 3rd grade teacher from Louisiana. They describe how these newer curricula incorporate...
Season 1 Episode 3 | “That cloud looks like an anvil” | In Episode 3 of " The Knowledge Matters Podcast: Reading Comprehension Revisited " you’ll hear from three teachers who’ve experienced the before and after of the shift to using a knowledge-building curriculum in their classrooms. Abby Boruff, Deloris Fowler, and Kyair Butts are three classroom teachers who are, in some ways, very different. They teach different ages, and different subjects, in different parts of the country, but in other wa...
