I, Shusheela Valdez, recently had the pleasure of joining the Knowledge Matters School Tour on a visit to Graves County, Kentucky — just down the road from where, a year ago, Mayfield, Kentucky was decimated by a Category 4 tornado. The School Tour traveled to this little community in the southwest corner of the state because of the reputation it had received as a model district for implementation of the OpenSciEd curriculum. We wanted to see what that looked like and learn how it happened.

For the last eight years, I have trained educators from Kentucky to California on implementing OpenSciEd, a high quality open source curriculum aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the instruction in Graves County — and the elegant way in which this amazing curriculum came to life — was the strongest I’ve seen anywhere.