Less is More

In his most recent post, Will Richardson states:
"My view is that we are teaching EVERY child way too much stuff, that EVERY child does not need nearly as much math or science or literature or history as we seem to think, and I believe that EVERY child loses a fair amount of creativity and curiosity in our zeal to deliver and test the all encompassing curriculum. And we do this because we think school is the only place to easily learn all that stuff, or because that’s what “college readiness” is. And in our subject-based world, everyone will fight to the death against eliminating any of it. "
My colleague and I have been struggling with the "too much stuff" idea for a few years now. But this year we finally took the plunge and started cutting learning targets left and right.  Which ones did we cut? The ones that students just had to know for a few days, the ones where students would have to remember it for one assessment and then never have to use it again for a later unit, course, or later in their lives.
We are tired of all the stuff getting in the way of the actual skills we want students to learn--like being able to think for themselves, generate their own questions and find their own answers, and examine problems critically and come up with solutions that make sense.  After deciding that these skills would be our priority, explicitly teaching students minutiae such as the difference between density-independent and density-dependent factors or the three parts of a nucleotide seems pretty pointless.
We want them to discover the minutiae they need to solve problems and explain lab results, not have them copy it down from some other source-text, teacher, internet-with no reason to learn it other than "the teacher said I had to."
So, we decided our first step was to slash some of our learning targets and make them more inquiry-specific rather than content-focused.  We started with our Ecology unit, and below are the learning targets we were faced with revising (that were written a few years ago).  (If you can't see them, you can click here.)