In reading chapters three through five I believe that one of the essential concepts is the KNOW/DO/BE bridge. For teachers the beginning place in planning a curriculum needs to be what is the most valuable and important thing that you want the students to know, what you want them to do with that knowledge, and what type of person you want the students to be. I believe the last part of the bridge about who you want the students to be has been a bit controversial. I think that teachers need to approach it in regard to what type of people they expect the students to be in their classroom. Such things as students being respectful and students being active participants in learning would fall in the BE category.

In reading this I learned about backwards design. Working backwards is a new thought for me, but one that really makes sense. As a teacher if I start all my lesson plans with a goal for student achievement and plan everything around that goal it seems that the students in my classroom would be likely to succeed. In the past I have been planning my lessons by starting with the standard. I believe that it is necessary to look at the standards, but in the future I will look at the standards and write down what I want the students to learn or achieve and try to plan activities that are related to what the achievement goal is.

These chapters had a lot of information about how to integrate multiple subject areas under one theme or achievement goal. I believe that this is very important. Students need to see that subjects are interrelated and that they can use things they learn in one subject to help them learn in another. These chapters also talked some about using different teaching stratgies and aksing higher level thinkign questions. In planning and implementing lessons a good place to go to be sure that higher thinking levle questions are being asked would be Bloom's Taxonomy.