The History Matters Campaign is a project of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. 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.
Episode Transcript
Sean Dimond
Students were expected to basically cover allーand I’m not really exaggerating here—like all of, of almost human history. The standards ran from the Stone Age through the late Renaissance. We would joke, you know, that it was like from Plato to NATO. They’re just jumping around, sort of leapfrogging in time. And it makes it very difficult, I think, to sort of develop that kind of sense of chronology that’s so essential in any kind of historical thinking.
Barbara Davidson
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.
Today I’m sharing my conversation with Sean Dimond, a former middle school social studies teacher, instructional coach, and director of social studies for the state of Louisiana.
Sean’s now the senior editor for social studies at the Core Knowledge Foundation, which offers an open-source K-8 history and geography curriculum that’s also the backbone of Louisiana’s statewide curriculum called Bayou Bridges.
Among other topics we discussed, is why narrative has such resonance for students and teachers alike and how stories can serve as the foundation for high-quality social studies curriculum. I think you’ll enjoy the discussion.
Barbara Davidson
Sean, thank you for being with us. It’s a pleasure to have you.
Sean Dimond
Oh Barbara, thank you so much for having me. It’s my absolute pleasure to be here.
Barbara Davidson
I like to start these conversations off by asking my guests to connect their professional story with this campaign for more and better elementary history instruction. So I guess my question is, how did you get fevered about this cause?
Sean Dimond
Yeah. The bulk of my time teaching was in middle school, particularly in seventh and eighth grade. And I had so many incredibly bright students who would just come into those grades with very little of what I think most adults would consider a pretty basic, you know, geographic, civic, historical, economic kind of knowledge. And you know, I think it’s really easy to blame teachers in grades below you or the students themselves or, you know, society or something.
But you could actually start to see that there were some problems with—in Louisiana, and I think this is actually true in many states—um with the standards themselves. And the difficulty that students would have kind of building historical knowledge when we’re not telling them a cohesive narrative and the jumps between the grade levels frankly made no sense. So I could give some real specific examples if it’s helpful.
Barbara Davidson
Yeah, let’s jump into it.
Sean Dimond
So in Louisiana—Yeah, so um in seventh grade, you know, we would begin the year with the—the standards with, you know, the American Revolution. Of course, in sixth grade Louisiana, we—students were expected to basically cover all—and I’m not really exaggerating here, like all of almost human history. The standards ran from the Stone Age through the late Renaissance. And we, would we would joke, you know, that it was like from, from Plato to NATO.
And that span was just an impossible level of coverage for sixth grade. But then just note that, you know, the last time they had talked about the American Revolution was in fourth grade. They’re just jumping around, sort of leapfrogging in time. And it makes it very difficult, I think, to sort of develop that kind of sense of chronology that’s so essential in any kind of historical thinking.
And then the other problem: the standards themselves were quite vague. And so it was very difficult for teachers to discern what to actually teach. Louisiana is unique among the states in that they assess social studies in elementary grades, right? The students take a high stakes test in third, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth grade and high school civics. And so there was this real disconnect between, you know, a pretty rigorous and difficult exam and pretty nebulous and, what I would describe as, kind of a broken sequence with no narrative within the standards, that um I think was really setting—not setting up teachers and students for success.
Barbara Davidson
How would you characterize the difference between your standards now and the prior standards?
Sean Dimond
Yeah, I would say like, maybe just coherence, chronological coherence. That the material moves generally chronologically and sort of spirals. So students return again to similar topics at a deeper and deeper level. But that in general, we try and move in a more purposeful and narrative sequence so that hopefully students’ experience in learning history it, you know, feels that much more coherent.
Barbara Davidson (11:53.677)
I love that. Again, the state is unique in having sponsored the creation of a curriculum. I guess in Louisiana’s case, that’s just what they do there, right? [laughter] But it’s still a kind of an audacious move when it comes to social studies, right? What were some of the factors in deciding to move forward in doing so?
Sean Dimond
Yeah, I think it was always the plan. So, if listeners don’t know, you know, Louisiana had created what I think is an absolutely wonderful English language arts curriculum in, in um ELA Guidebooks. So there was this precedent within the department, you know, that we can make and produce excellent and high quality curricula.
Barbara Davidson
So the CKHG product was written for a national audience. Were there things that had to happen in order to make that curriculum line up better with your standards and Louisiana’s experience?
Sean Dimond
Bayou Bridges which is what we came to call the um K-8 social studies curriculum that we developed for the new Louisiana social study standards, was absolutely built off the bones of Core Knowledge History and Geography. And so there was a lot of pre-existing um you know text and activities that we could build on top of.
So I’d say, you know, beyond the sort of pre-existing CKHG material that we were able to build off of, there’s just some absolutely brilliant folks who work at the Core Knowledge Foundation who have an incredible amount of editorial and publishing experience, especially in the elementary grade levels, wherein writing, you know, engaging and understandable text for a kindergartner or first grade student. You know, something that just years of experience working on high quality social studies textbooks that we did not have in-house.
Barbara Davidson
Step back if you will, and talk about the teaching history to elementary students through narration. And I don’t think that that’s so common. I mean, it makes certain sense to me, but I—that’s not really my experience with a lot of curricula that I’m seeing out there, history textbooks for young children.
Sean Dimond
You know, we sometimes think of elementary education as a sort of random collection of information about holidays, which is lovely. But certainly, I think we can, we can do better. When we were thinking about approaching, you know, all the curricula K-8 but especially K-5, of balancing these sort of different modes of how, you know, of how we kind of approach history.
And, you know, I could briefly describe these modes as kind of, you know, monumental, how we, you know, present sort of the, the kind of great individuals or stories in history and that, you know, that inspires, you know, children and, and people more generally. And this is an important element but we don’t want to lean too heavily into this, because then you get into this weird sort of hero worship. You know, 80% of human history maybe isn’t, isn’t monumental and that interesting, and therefore it’s not important, right.
Sean Dimdon 22:01
And then we’re balancing that with this just antiquarian history. Where just, you know, there is an immense amount of facts and details that you have to learn to make educated claims about history. You lean too heavily in this direction, it becomes this turgid dusty tome of why, you know, this is important. But you lean too little, you don’t have the ammunition to make any interesting claims about, about history.
And then, you know, we also wanted to balance this idea of critical history, of evaluating and judging and, you know, looking at things with a critical judging eye. And that’s certainly part of it. But if you lean too heavily into that, that’s very deflationary, you know. Can’t remember who said it, you know, no one’s a hero to their chauffeur, right? If you get close enough to any individual they’re not perfect. You know, but you certainly want to have an element of this otherwise you lean into this: something is great just because it’s old, right. Which is also a big problem.
So you know, we had these sort of big philosophical, you know, thoughts running through our mind while we’re, while we’re working on the curriculum. But then we try and bring these things down to—is to how do you operationalize these ideas? You know, and that’s really actually pretty challenging. Um. I can give a really quick example if it’s helpful of how this actually looks.
Barbara Davidson
Please, yeah. Yeah.
Sean Dimond
So we have a Civil War unit. And within that unit, right, students are reading an expository text about the Civil War and they’re, you know, building a whole bunch of specific knowledge about the Civil War. And that text, you know, we worked to try and write it in a narrative way. The materials are organized as chapters—not specific lessons, right, to try and emphasize this narrative approach.
And throughout that chapter, they’re also gonna be reading a few excerpts of different speeches by Lincoln, you know, he’s going to talk a little bit about, you know, I would—if I could keep the union together by ending slavery, I would. If I could, you know, these statements that complicate the picture of Lincoln.
And then at the end, they’re going to read this letter from Tolstoy about Lincoln, which is the the clearest example of kind of monumental mystery I can think of, wherein Tolstoy gushingly compares Lincoln to Christ in miniature. You know, he’s so—we’re so near to him we can’t understand his greatness, like looking at the sun.
And then having to—read all these things, the students will then participate in the classroom debate wherein they try—either defend or try and refute Tolstoy’s claims about Lincoln’s near divinity. Right. And so I think having done this, we’ve now engaged the monumental, the critical, and the antiquarian modes. And I think these things being in balance, you know, that’s what I think of as like a solid—you know, what makes a solid history curriculum.
Barbara Davidson
Wow.
Sean Dimond
Like, balancing these modes. and then obviously addressing all the state standards.
Barbara Davidson
So Sean, what has surprised you about how teachers have responded to Bayou Bridges?
Sean Dimond (25:53.45)
Louisiana teachers are amazing. I mean, there’s been so much said about Louisiana’s growth in the past few years recently in the news. And I just think that’s so deserved and wonderful. I think Louisiana teachers are just incredible and deserve, you know, all the credit in the world. And they’ve had a lot of goodwill and positivity towards Bayou Bridges. And, you know, we also had—and have—some very intelligent and thoughtful critics who, you know, I hope have pushed us to make the materials even stronger.
But I will say, I think that having some of the immense amount of additional labor in putting together materials that they know cover all the standards and are, you know, are written to try to be as engaging as possible, while also as rigorous as possible. Just having that intellectual prep somewhat—not done for them, that’s not the right word—but done with them, you know. They are incredibly appreciative.
And I think quite frankly that there’s, you know, we’ve had some teachers say that they learned some more information about this material, even if they had been teaching it for years, because the teacher guides we wrote are so deep. And you know, that can be a real challenge for implementation because there’s a lot there. But ultimately, I think it enriches everyone’s experience.
Barbara Davidson
Well, I have this instinct and it may be wishful thinking, but I don’t think I’m so wrong-headed on it, that these topics are ones that even teachers appreciate learning about. I consider myself something of a history buff and um I actually used the CKHG curriculum with nieces and nephews during COVID.
Sean Dimond
That’s amazing.
Barbara Davidson
But I loved learning more. So I do think that teachers are um grateful not only for having lessons structured for them, obviously, knowing that they are covering the standards and preparing students for greater learning down the road, but to have a little fun! And they see their—the kids, you know, so much, so much more engaged than they, you know, had been in social studies before to the extent that it was taught. But kids, kids love these stories. As one little boy said to me: I just like using my brain. I like learning stuff, you know?
Sean Dimond
Yeah. I mean, it seems like the story is sort of the natural default, like, mode of how we communicate, really. I mean, I think you can make an argument that, like, you know, everything kind of having a temporal element, you could break pretty much any process down into a story, or every process is, in sense, a story. And we’re just sort of leaning into that, that truth and it resonates.
Barbara Davidson
Do you have any advice, sitting where you sit, for other states or districts looking to create or adapt curriculum? You know, what—where should they start?
Sean Dimond
It’s absolutely possible. I hope that Louisiana is—you know, shows that at least. I think some of it does stem from adopting standards that facilitate having a strong curriculum built on top of them. I mean, I think you can build good materials off maybe not the strongest standards, but you’re, you’re fighting, you know, an uphill battle.
Barbara Davidson
And by good standards, can I just go—get you on record about this, this sort of skills versus content?
Sean Dimond
I mean, I—I take the Hirschian perspective on this. I think content is king. And that to the degree we think about skills, they’re almost an emergent phenomenon. And that my ability to you know make an excellent claim and show my, you know, historical thinking skills about the Antebellum South is pretty predicated on my specific knowledge about the antebellum south. I can’t just turn the skill and make a great claim about you know Tang Imperial China right. It just doesn’t, doesn’t work like this. There’s no silver bullet. Building knowledge is something that is just essential, especially in any kind of historical thinking.
Barbara Davidson
I am going to ask you one final question that I try to pose to all of our guests, Sean. What gives you hope about elementary history instruction right now?
Sean Dimond
Somewhat the reception of our—of the Louisiana materials. I was in Louisiana a few months ago at the summit and talking to so many elementary teachers who said like, you know, I used to dread teaching social studies and now we really enjoy it. And I’m trying to carve out more time in the day to spend on it.
You know, to think that we made even some iota of difference down where it actually counts and what the kids are learning in class. That, you know, was immensely positive. It made me very hopeful.
Barbara Davidson
To learn more about Sean’s work, you can visit the Core Knowledge Foundation’s website at coreknowledge.org This is linked in our show notes.
This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at knowledgematterscampaign.org.
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