Academic Excellence – the 2nd “A” – 11/7/2015

 

 

 

 

 

Academic Excellence at Parkview – the 2nd “A”

Christians are instructed to “…do everything heartily, as unto the Lord,” in Colossians 3:23.  This early guidance for believers set the stage for what we would call an “assumption of excellence” in our last strategic plan.  In keeping with that spirit, we believe we have a mandate from God to do everything with a spirit of excellence.  This means we should reflect the character of Christ in our academic standards.  We most represent who God is when we put our best into every achievement.  

 

The second major section in our strategic plan, after Abundant Life, is Academic Excellence.  As we continue to improve our school, we have decided to focus more intently on the three areas of professional competitiveness, future workforce needs, and data driven instruction.  You can read about these subsections in detail by downloading the strategic plan from our website.  In this blog, I want to give you a narrative of what these improvements will mean for the students at Parkview.  

 

The first subsection, professional competitiveness, assumes that our teacher is the doorway to our students’ success.  We want to intentionally focus on processes that encourage, challenge, and grow our faculty in ways that increase the effectiveness of our classrooms and the experience our students have on campus.  We want to produce lifelong learners, so in this part of the strategic plan, we are being sure that we are lifelong learners ourselves. One of the tangible ways we are doing this is by setting parameters and requirements for professional development for our teachers. We have many hours of job embedded professional development, and each teacher is also required to complete at least ten hours outside of the normal in-school options. 

 

The second subsection, future workforce needs, has to do with looking to the future to be sure the offerings at Parkview serve our students well when they graduate.  This is where we will continue to develop our media department and look at programs such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).  Technology and Media, such as film production, are just two examples of industries in our area that have a demand for students who have particular skills.  At Parkview, we want to be sure we are investing in skills that will make our students the most successful at the next level.  

 

The last subsection, data driven instruction, has to do with fine-tuning our curriculum and its delivery.  It also involves making sure all of our divisions are working together to build our students’ skills in a systematic fashion.  A focus here will assure that we are efficiently moving students into higher levels of achievement.  A by product of this focus will be evident in students being accepted into the college of their choice.  We have a data team in place already that regularly meets to disaggregate  and analyze our student data in order to adjust curriculum and strategies as needed.

 

While the world may seek to achieve excellence to beat someone else or to be better than another organization, Parkview seeks to achieve excellence because it honors God to do our best.  We want our academic standards and how we seek to achieve them to reflect the quality of the God we serve.  

 

Always #parkviewstrong,

Don R. Mayes, Superintendent