Big Ideas

All experts wind up with key, subconscious frameworks of understanding within their discipline. These frameworks are usually common to folks in the same discipline, who are trained in the same way. And these frameworks really do become subconscious—experts are often no longer even aware that their expertise is organized along these lines, just as you may no longer know how to describe "how to ride a bike," or "how to read" in words.

By actually watching experts work and talk together, someone on the outside can begin to describe what these frameworks look like. The reason it's so important to understand these subconscious expert frameworks is that for most people, these frameworks will not emerge without systematic teaching and practice over time. It's incredibly important to us to understand what these frameworks look like, so that we (and you) can make the right down-payments on future expertise.

We call these frameworks the "Big Ideas" in a subject area, and we use them to help organize the content and provide the focus for every new course we build.

This is another way that we are different from other curriculum companies, and why we think working hard on our programs will pay off for your family. In addition to what we can find from existing studies, we actually do the interviewing work ourselves with experts to find out the Big Ideas. We've done this with physicists, mathematicians, historians, writers, and more.

Once we have a structure of the Big Ideas from the experts and our own reviews of cognitive science literature, we put it to work as we develop courses across grade levels. We want to make sure we are making early down-payments on these Big Ideas, so that your children can choose what areas to become experts in later—not be blocked out because they simply didn't get the right starting points.

For example, quantum mechanics is a core Big Idea in physics. But we haven't found any way to teach quantum mechanics to anyone under 18! What we have done is make a down payment on something that can be a stumbling block: waves. Waves are wet and fun and engaging. And while we have our students' minds engaged in thinking about and making waves, we are actually making the first down payment—in elementary school—on quantum theory! Imagine! We don't know of any other curriculum that has taken this approach.

Next Section:
Avoiding Misconceptions: Fractions and other train wrecks