Payne STEAM
Academy
The Mission
of our Academy will be to educate the whole child by providing an engaging and
challenging
learning
environment to ensure that each student receives a premier education.
To fulfill
this mission, we will use an innovative approach to education. We will adopt
the Engineering
Design Process.
The Engineering Design Process gives students a strategy for identifying and
solving
problems. By
empowering students to identify problems, education becomes drastically
more
relevant to students in the context of their own communities without sacrificing
academic rigor.
This design process requires
teachers to instruct students in a certain manner so that students are
always
involved in one of the following steps during their learning:
1.
Identifying a problem
2.
Researching that problem
3. Brainstorming
solutions to that problem
4. Analyzing
the proposed solutions and ideas regarding the problem
5. Building,
testing, sharing and, if necessary, re-designing the solution to the problem
6. Sharing
and communicating the finished product Through the use of this process, we hope
to develop
the
following competencies in our students:
1. Effective
reading, writing, listening and speaking skills
2. Sense of
purpose and sense of self
3.
Resiliency
4.
Collaboration
5. Problem
solving
6. Critical
and creative thinking
7.
Technological fluency
8. Physical
and social-emotional wellness
9.
Leadership
We envision
a student learning environment that focuses on project-based instruction in
every
classroom.
Curriculum Courses offered
The courses
offered at the Academy will be aligned to the current District curriculum,
which is aligned to
Alabama
standards. The Academy will provide project-based learning that will offer real
world,
relevant and
complex problems. Classrooms will be facilitated by teachers who guide students
to ask
questions,
research, solve problems and develop new technologies.
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= Robotics/Lego Clubs will be a focus this school year.
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