The goals of the Parkway Schools Middle Academy For Exceptionally Gifted Learners are to provide an environment that meets the needs of each student through experiences that strengthen the students' higher order thinking skills, nurture their creative abilities, and assist in their social/emotional development.

Level IV gifted services in Parkway is implemented through the Parkway Schools Middle Academy For Exceptionally Gifted Learners. This is a centralized self-contained program. Students who qualify for this program enroll at Parkway West Middle School and attend highly accelerated core classes in Communication Arts (ELA), Social Studies, Math, and Science. The students are integrated within the school community for art, physical education, music, drama, family and consumer science, technology and industrial arts, business, modern and classical languages, and other elective classes. The curriculum is trans-disciplinary with an international focus, incorporating Missouri’s grade level expectations and the Common Core Standards. The curriculum utilizes components of a variety of middle school, high school, and college level model curricula. Student inquiry, Problem-Based Learning, Design Thinking, Socratic Dialogue, and Critical Thinking are key components in guiding the learning process.

The Academy strives to meet the individual needs of each learner. The teachers, counselors, and administrators work as a team with parents to develop a learning plan for each student. Each schedule takes into account the academic (e.g., subject strengths and weakness, 504, IEP) and social-emotional needs of the student.

The base model scope and sequence is shown below.

The Academy stresses process. To that end, learning is accomplished through identifying a real-world problem, researching the problem, generating potential solutions, prototyping the solutions, making revisions to the prototype as needed, then presenting the findings to real-world experts. This structure is called "Problem-Based Learning." Combined with "Design Thinking," students learn how to process through any potential problem making them proactive learners as opposed to reactive learners.

The basic structures of Problem-Based Learning and Design Thinking are overlaid in the map below.