NARRATIVE

Educators in the Winfield City School System work together to plan, administer, and enhance high-quality STEM learning activities with the help of support staff, community partners, and students across grades and disciplines. The district offers significant large-scale professional learning opportunities, as well as key training and workshops conducted at the school level. More crucially, Winfield City Schools has created frameworks to encourage continual learning and cooperation in self-assessed environments. When working on critical initiatives, teachers have set aside time for team collaboration. Literacy and numeracy are two areas of critical academic value at Winfield City Schools. Each grade level has time set aside for collaboration in order to help students narrow success disparities in those areas. Similarly, in grade-level meetings, teachers collaborate across curricula to develop, implement, and evaluate lessons.

Educators use Schoology and Google's collaborative capabilities with students to increase the power of cooperation in their work. Educators also work with community partners on major initiatives throughout the year, such as the Fall Festival and the STEM-Art Expo, as well as other large events. Certain committees have been formed to ensure that the major STEM events go off without a hitch. The Fall Festival Committee, for example, meets regularly during the fall semester to communicate, delegate, and plan the fall festival. The STEM Leadership Committee meets once every nine weeks to discuss and collaborate on the school's general direction, as well as logistical and environmental changes that could improve teaching and learning. The STEM Leadership Committee also sets protocols and guidelines throughout the year.

Strengths: WCS's largest strengths with this standard are Engagement, Sustainability, and Embeddedness. The faculty at WCS are completely consumed by collaboration within the school and community. The collaboration has become more substantial to Winfield City School teachers, and there have been some new collaboration opportunities embedded within the last few years. Marzano Learning Rounds, for example, have been implemented at the middle school level in order to observe, collaborate, and self-assess within the classroom.

Opportunities to Improve: Obtaining Results for this standard is a weakness for WCS. We often attend the meetings, talk about new ideas, improvements, etc. but we do not collect the data that is needed to be rated a 4 for this standard.