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At SPARK Academy, we believe that STEM literacy is best developed through interdisciplinary units and explicit teaching of Success Skills. We believe that our students' progress is best assessed through observation, project based assessment tasks, and mastery of academic standards.

The largest challenge we face when developing workforce readiness skills is the age of our students. Our faculty believes that we have identified the key skills we want our students to demonstrate by the end of third grade and the entire faculty has a shared vocabulary for use when using the Engineering Design Process with our students. While we have been using the Engineering Design Process since the inception of SPARK Academy, the focus on personal and collaborative success skills is an initiative that we have only begun this year. Our initial data was collected during the instructional rounds held at our school in April 2019 and again in May 2019. The April rounds were conducted by the Alabama Best Practices Center and focused on our students making connections to real world applications of their learning.

Our school district, as a whole, is committed to reflective teaching and learning. To that end, SPARK Academy hosted a district-wide group of Instructional Leadership Teams at our school as they practiced the protocol for instructional rounds. Again, we had the same problem of practice of connecting our teaching to real world applications of STEM. Below are pictures of the data the team shared with the faculty. The focus of these instructional rounds was on what the students were doing and how they were interacting with the content and the teacher, with our goal of having our students be truly engaged.

Following the instructional rounds at our school, our Instructional Leadership Team had the opportunity last spring to participate in instructional rounds at our middle school. During those rounds, our team, along with teams from other schools in our district, was able to observe students within classrooms, focusing on the school’s self-identified problem of practice. The middle school focused on the differences between student coordination, cooperation, and collaboration, with their goal of providing interactions for their students that facilitated collaboration at the deepest level.

Following those instructional rounds, our ILT reflected on the same problem of practice within our own school and came to the realization that while we expected our students to demonstrate a number of STEM competencies and skills, we, as a faculty, had never really defined those skills nor researched which skills were developmentally appropriate for our students.

Using observational data from our instructional rounds, we knew that our students were masters of parallel play and cooperation, but we could not say definitively that our students were able to collaborate. That discussion led to our faculty developing and implementing our Personal and Collaboration Success Skills rubrics.

Our SEAL (SPARK Educators Assisting Learners) Team made of specialists and resource teachers worked at the end of the 2018-2019 school year, throughout the summer, and into the fall to research how 21st Century skills looked at the primary level. Collaboration skills were developed into one rubric, Personal Success skills into a second, and the Engineering Design Process into a third. Each rubric was then divided into component skills that needed to be explicitly taught at each grade level. Each rubric contains developmentally-appropriate activities and resources for teachers to use in their classrooms. The SEAL Team also developed visuals for teachers to use in the classroom.

Once the rubrics were developed, the SEAL Team developed a plan for teaching and reinforcing the information on the rubrics with the entire faculty. The team first introduced a strategy for sharing ideas with a group during our annual faculty retreat in August, with a plan in place to teach each skill during faculty meetings throughout the 2019-2020 school year, along with introducing the skills and protocols to our students.

Transitioning to a school-wide STEM academy has resulted in numerous positive outcomes that are present in multiple sources of data.

Athens City students in kindergarten through second grade are given the DIBELS test. Using the grade-level indicators that DIBELS says most directly predicts success (K- nonsense words, correct letter sounds; 1st & 2nd - Oral reading fluency) our 2017-2018 proficiency rate was 51%. This proficiency rate is significantly more than the last three school years; 37%, 43%, and 41% respectively. Our second grade achievement in math, using Performance Series scores as our indicator, went from 43% proficient in the spring of 2017 to 53% proficient in the spring of 2018.

Global Scholar is also a measure of student success utilized by Athens City for grades three and four. Our third grade Performance Series percent proficient for reading went from 34% in Spring of 2017 to 44% in the Spring of 2018 (Spring 2017 ASPIRE - 16% Ready or above). Our third grade Performance Series percent proficient in math went from 35% in Spring of 2017 to 57% in the Spring of 2018 (Spring 2017 ASPIRE - 48% Ready or above). Although we no longer have fourth grade at our school, we felt it was appropriate to share our 2017-2018 improvements in student data. Our fourth grade Performance Series percent proficient for reading went from 37% in Spring of 2017 to 53% in the Spring of 2018 (Spring 2017 ASPIRE - 29% Ready or above). Our fourth grade Performance Series percent proficient for math went from 37% in Spring of 2017 to 45% in the Spring of 2018 (Spring 2017 ASPIRE - 46% Ready or above).

Our growth has also been reflected in our Alabama State Department of Education Report Card score. The Department of Education uses multiple data points to determine our overall grade. We are very proud that over the past three years, our school has grown from a 72 overall score in 2017, to an 82 in 2018, and finally a 90 overall score in 2019. Over the three year period that the state has provided this data, we have grown in all areas: in Academic Growth, we grew from 83% in 2017, 88% in 2018, to 100% in 2019; in reading we grew from 22% proficient in 2017, 50% proficient in 2018, to 55% proficient in 2019; and in math we grew from 47% proficient in 2017, 53% proficient in 2018, to 61% proficient in 2019.

While we do not focus on our testing or test data as a faculty, it is very rewarding to see the results of our hard work as reported by the state. It affirms for us that we are truly doing what is best for our students in designing their learning experiences.

We are very proud of our students’ achievements in math and reading but we are also striving to learn how to quantify other important skills such as collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. We have strategically placed time in our schedule for reflection and revision of our rubrics at the end of the year. Our biggest challenge is how to collect data on students’ growth in using collaborative and personal success skills.