What would teachers give to get all their K–12 students to be curiosity-driven, creative problem-solvers and critical thinkers in STEM? To indulge their curiosity for their own satisfaction? To routinely ace tests and wield AI like a rapier? What if there were only one cost: not fighting educational inertia, not permission from above or lengthy professional development, not expensive instructional materials or science labs or computers.  

Nor is the cost money. It is one every teacher can easily afford, but it is the most demanding of all: to think differently, very differently. The first challenge is to begin where K–12 educational change has never before ventured: at the grassroots of classroom teaching, where individual STEM teachers, many championed by their students’ parents, can each choose to act—any curricular mandate is easily incorporated. The second is absorbing a science of curiosity, a drive stronger than pain avoidance. Both didactic and inquiry-based instruction have largely circumvented it  The third is diving into groundbreaking cognitive science that bridges the interface with neurology. The minds-on and brains-on combination is precise enough to transform AI into AGI. Well over the horizon of current educational psychology, these two new scientific fields expand today’s tired paradigms of learning and teaching into three fully articulated dimensions.  

Thinking differently creates an educational explosion within any isolated classroom. 3-D teachers direct that energy through an online Curriculum Library designed by and for teachers who share 3-D lessons in a marketplace where they benefit financially in direct proportion to their instructional expertise. The Library is couched within an online Curriculum Cooperative that provides teachers with a supportive community, profit sharing, and a four-rung professional ladder planted in their classroom. For practitioners, this book is a minds-on how-to that inexorably leads to the operational Curriculum Library and Cooperative. It ends by describing how teachers monetize their local expertise and climb the ladder alongside their school employment, attracting budding scientists to become teacherpreneurs dedicated to spreading the fruits and joy of empowered curiosity. 

This is the educator’s complete guide to understanding and implementing a three-dimensional model of classroom practice for teaching kids higher-order thinking as espoused by the Next Generation Science Standards. A 300-page core with numerous diagrams, sidebars, and anecdotes is surrounded by four hundred pages of in-depth chapters for mentors and leaders, chapters that develop a science of (science) education, and eight appendices of practical resources. The concept dimension of the concept-content-skill eponymous triad is explored in depth to show teachers how the contours of this cognitive terrain can be navigated for maximum student success. Their ability to implement the 3-D model to generate conceptual knowledge transfer and outstanding performance on the NGSS is empowered by two custom tools described in the book’s final section.   

The five chapters added to the 3-D Core expand individual classroom practice into community, beginning with a more subtle and complex understanding of the 3-D paradigm as would be useful for mentors helping colleagues. The last two additional chapters describe the Curriculum Library tool and Curriculum Cooperative platform designed to make 3-D teaching and learning more productive and satisfying for both teacher and student.