Katharina Matro teaches world and US history at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland. Previously she spent five years teaching history and economics at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart. Matro graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, holds an MA from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a PhD in central European history from Stanford University. Her dissertation won the 2016 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral dissertation on a topic in German history written at a North American university. In her classes, she emphasizes historian’s actual work. As much as possible, she puts scholarly historical texts in front of her students to help them see how these stories are constructed. She is passionate about making more academic resources available to high school teachers who often do not have the time to explore current scholarship. She is also a dedicated teacher of critical reading and writing and is adamant that her students discover how their history classes help them improve both. That said, she believes that our profession should not neglect the enormous content knowledge we hold: students are interested in our stories; these stories draw them to our classroom in the first place.
Katharina Matro
