One thing I've learned about myself over my years in education is that I'm a little weird. Yep...weird. I think differently and I do things differently. And over the years, I've learned to embrace it.
At first, I didn't know I was different because of the educational experiences I was lucky enough to have. First, I went to a magnet high school located in Wichita's City Hall that was always doing things outside the box. Then, in college, I worked at a preschool that was all about project based learning and doing what was developmentally appropriate for kids. In these settings, apparently weird was the norm.
With the adoption of CCSS and the Next Generation Science Standards, I feel like my weirdness has been vindicated. If you unpack the standards, you find these precious little things called practice standards. Within these practice standards, it becomes clear that we no longer just want to know what a child knows...we want to see what the child can do with that knowledge.
Tamara Konrade once told me something that I hold true to this day....our standards are the curriculum and textbooks and the other tools are resources we use to teach them. If we allow that statement and those standards to lead us, our kids will be able to apply their knowledge all the way up to the top of the Bloom's Ladder!
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