Episode
Season Two, Episode 6: The Knowledge Rich Classroom of Laura Stam
- Podcast
- Chalk Dust
- Published
- May 31, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2632
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://chalkdust.media/p/season-two-episode-5-the-knowledge
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Summary
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 elaborate their thinking. The result is a classroom where students are excited to contribute, but supported enough to do so with precision and confidence. Mentioned resources and explainers The Knowledge Exchange Laura’s Substack , focused on building teacher knowledge through practical resources, classroom examples, and reflections on evidence-informed teaching. The Reading League Wyoming Laura is a founding board member of The Reading League Wyoming, part of a broader movement supporting knowledge about evidence-aligned reading instruction. Core Knowledge History and Geography Laura adapted part…