What Makes Great Elementary History Curriculum | Sean Dimond

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Sep 30, 2025

Sean Dimond, a former middle-school teacher and now senior social studies editor at the Core Knowledge Foundation, shares insights on creating a high-quality history curriculum in Louisiana. He highlights the pitfalls of vague standards that once hindered learning and how the new Bayou Bridges curriculum offers a coherent, chronological approach. Discussing a captivating Civil War lesson, Dimond emphasizes the importance of narrative in teaching. With positive teacher feedback, he expresses hope for engaging students in meaningful historical learning.

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ANECDOTE

Overloaded, Jumpy Sixth-Grade History

Sean Dimond recounts teaching with vague standards that forced sixth graders to

INSIGHT

Chronological Coherence Matters

Louisiana redesigned standards for chronological coherence so topics progress logically through time.

ANECDOTE

Bayou Bridges Built On Core Knowledge

Bayou Bridges was built from the Core Knowledge history and geography backbone and adapted for Louisiana.

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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 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.

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.