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knew that our buildings needed to move towards places where students learned to experiment and imagine INSTEAD of remaining places where students spend their days listening and memorizing.

Go and ask any high schooler taking AP classes how much "designing and creating" they do before their final exams.  Chances are, you'll hear a WHOLE lot more about the "memorizing and cramming."

If you REALLY want risk-taking teachers who spend their days showing kids how to design and create, then start DEMANDING that your elected officials -- who are the real power players in conversations about what's happening in our classrooms -- rethink what we're holding schools accountable for. 

Singer describes critical thinking as the ability to simultaneously comprehend, analyze, and evaluate a line of reasoning, a concept, or a problem relative to one's own perspective and the perspective of others to arrive at deeper understanding.

AP physics class, students use the same deconstruction skills to break down free-response questions, examine the information, and then synthesize it to create diagrams and experiments.