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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