What Joe Rogan and Ken Burns Taught Me About Teaching History

Not long ago, I found myself unexpectedly drawn into a nearly three-hour conversation between documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and podcaster Joe Rogan - two figures you might never expect to inform K–12 schooling. But what struck me wasn’t the celebrities themselves; it was what their audiences reveal about learning. In a world captivated by short-form content, millions still seek depth, nuance, and sustained engagement with big ideas.

That’s the same hunger I saw in classrooms implementing knowledge-rich history instruction. In those rooms, educators didn’t just play films or podcasts; they built knowledge tier by tier, helping students connect texts, primary sources, timelines, and perspectives in ways that made history feel both complex and meaningful.

Burns’s long-form documentaries and Rogan’s extended conversations remind us that people still crave substance. But in schools, this craving only bears fruit when students have background knowledge and scaffolded curricula that let them wrestle with nuance, answer big questions, and think deeply about who we were and who we might become.

Read my full essay, published in Education Next, here