Curriculum Integration!!! What a truly exciting article this was for me. I believe this is precisely how a learning environment should be designed, created, and fostered for authentic learning to occur and develop inherently deep-rooted relevant knowledge in our students. “Curriculum integration classes are designed to promote cognitive growth for students—not feed them content to be regurgitated on demand.” (Brown 2011) I have always felt this way about student-centered and constructed curriculum development theoretically and honestly tried to emulate such in my own classrooms, yet have rarely seen it actually ensue ultimately due to external Administrative constraints. Montessori and International Baccalaureate Programs have been the closest approximation I have personally witnessed; however even those pedagogies have very distinct and required formats beyond a student-designed curriculum. I’m so curious about how much freedom these schools actually allowed their students and what such successful programs exactly look like in reality, not just in the world of academic research. This study definitely motivated me to spend more time exploring valid exemplary models and other articles related to CI like those cited by Brown & Knowles (2007). A lingering question I had was what is happening currently with these CI Programs, and where and how, being that the most recent citations from this study are just about 10 years old already? Like most educators, I would assume, I crave to provide the most engaging lessons for my kids. It’s undeniable that I was inspired by Brown’s conclusion that, “Students emphasize being highly motivated due to the choice they have in determining curricula.” (2011) Yet, I can’t help but be leery of how I could make such CI models come to fruition in a NYS Public HS, and what battles I would have to fight in order to do so, the reality possibly too overwhelming to conquer. Is there compromise?