Academy of Academic Excellence
Payne Elementary 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.