I once inherited a unit on Ancient Egypt that I would consider “knowledge-rich”. Teachers had identified all of the things the students were to know by the end of the unit, such as gods and goddesses, importance of the Nile, mummification,

Discovery of king tut, Egyptian architecture, slavery and forced labor, hieroglyphics, papyrus, role of women, ancient medicine, etc, etc. I taught it for one year, and it was great! The kids

learned so much and fell in love with the subject. Many wanted to become archeologists. But the next year a new admin arrived, hell bent on removing all the “boring facts” in the units and replacing them

with what she called “concepts.” Our unit about Ancient Egypt became, “Civilizations” and we were to focus on concepts, not facts, pertaining to anything vaguely related to the civilizations theme. Plus, we were to

not tell the students great stories and expose them to really interesting things, but ask them what they thought makes a civilization work and to design their own civilization. Try as we might we couldn’t make it work, and when the admin left unceremoniously

the next year, we turned it back into the old unit. Kids loved it. Ive since left and I’ve heard the Egypt unit is no more at that school. When people on Twitter talk about “knowledge rich” they don’t mean boring old crusty rote learnin’

They mean awesome units about interesting things. They don’t mean standardized tests, they mean opening the world up for kids to experience things that they never would have encountered without school.