Educate me on your take on Common Core.

[digonswine]

2. There is no way to go into it in great detail here--

There is a general trend toward teaching kids "how" to think--with less of a focus on pure content. The techniques are fairly well backed up by research-though much is yet to be done.

Start with searches for inquiry-based learning, understanding by design, and other such concepts.

These are not feel-good, let kids decide types of techniques. They are very complicated and will take much time to implement. In fact, putting those and active learning strategies and retrieval-based techniques into practice is nearly impossible for an individual teacher to do well.

Your friend is right--it needs to start early--it will also take teachers MANY years to get good at this-even if they are trained in the newer techniques early.

Yes-I am a teacher, and yes I am dealing with this now. And--yes--it will take me much time to become great at something no one has yet to perfect. The idea is to get better and to continue to improve.