Overarching goal of these reforms:
The Northeast Academy for Aerospace and Advanced Technologies (NEAAAT) is a public charter school in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, with the ambition to provide “all students with the STEM-related skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to meet future challenges in the global workforce and their communities.”
To achieve this goal, the NEAAAT team first developed a three-part framework of student learning outcomes to underpin this vision, drawing on the North Carolina Standard Course of Study, feedback from stakeholders, and similar models from other states and school systems. The NEAAAT team organizes learning outcomes into three categories:
- Mindsets, which are defined as “a student’s established set of attitudes or beliefs.” These include qualities such as empathy, resilience, a community-facing orientation, and a growth mindset. The skills are, says NEAAAT, “more foundational to a person’s character than skillsets or toolsets,” and more critical to long-term success
- Skillsets, which represent deep mastery of academic content, tied to real-world applications and cross-disciplinary problem-solving. Many of these standards were developed through ongoing engagement with the business community and other stakeholders.
- Toolsets, which involve a student’s ability to identify and improve workforce development skills including project and resource management, communication, design thinking, prototyping, selection of instrumentation and equipment, and teaming.
The leadership team at NEAAAT then worked with its school community to develop its own Portrait of a Graduate, describing the “durable skills” and competencies they are looking for students to attain. By building real-world, project-based learning experiences around this framework, educators at NEAAAT—who are known as “coaches” and who embrace a coaching mindset—are able to prepare students for long-term career and college success
Innovation efforts currently underway:
- A new, custom-built app for mastery learning. This new app, being developed with focus group feedback, will feature a data dashboard on student outcomes, providing students and families with real-time feedback aligned to NEAAAT’s mindsets, skillsets, and toolsets. NEAAAT is working on this innovative app in response to student and parent requests for real-time personalized feedback instead of a traditional reporting period.
- Systems alignment. NEAAAT is currently working to better align their curriculum and instructional supports to the Profile of a Graduate, ensuring a more coherent program of anytime, anywhere competency-based learning.
- Portrait of a Coach. Building off their Portrait of a Graduate, NEAAAT is also working to develop a Portrait of a Coach, better defining the skills and competencies that make education professionals successful in executing NEAAAT’s unique instructional model.
Moving Beyond the Carnegie Unit: The NEAAAT model adopts a number of elements that move away from the age-old seat-time approach of the Carnegie Unit.
- The model embraces a student-centered, Standards-Based Mastery model that incorporates “a set of instructional practices through which students gradually build their ability to assess their own current level of mastery and set their own learning paths.”
- NEAAAT’s real-world, project-based learning approach allows students to “gain knowledge and skills by working an extended period of time collaboratively to design, deliver and discover solutions to a complex question, problem, or challenge.”
- Students demonstrate their learning through public exhibitions from smaller mini-Expos that attract hundreds of visitors throughout the year to the large annual Expo in February that is attended by thousands showcasing the Mindsets, Skillsets, and Toolsets “essential for future success”.
About Northeast Academy for Aerospace and Advanced Technologies
- https://www.northeastacademy.org/
- Public charter school located in Elizabeth City, NC.
- It has 756 students in grades 5-12 and is a Title I public school serving 8 different counties.
SPOTLIGHT: Design Thinking
NEAAAT has embraced a Design Thinking model, which they describe as “a cyclical, human-centered approach to problem-solving that encourages students to develop a deep understanding of how individuals experience a given problem in order to arrive at effective solutions.” This process, they say, “helps students build an awareness of the wide variety of ways in which others experience the world and how factors like culture, geography, physical ability, resource availability, and many others can impact the efficacy of a given solution.”
Design Thinking is a required course in grades 5-8 and meets every day. The students advance through a series of interdisciplinary units that introduce them to design thinking concepts. NEAAAT organizes these concepts into an EmpathizeàDefineàIdeateàPrototypeàTestàShare cycle, through which students learn to deeply understand the challenge at hand, develop and test solutions, and share their findings for peer and community feedback.
As an example of this approach, The NEAAAT team recently crafted a “Carnival Game” unit for 7th graders, which tasked them to “design and create a carnival game based on probability that people will enjoy playing and will allow 3 prize levels based on chances of winning.” Students then applied their knowledge of statistics and probabilities to design and build a game which could be played by community members during the school’s fall festival. Students were to collect and analyze data on how well their game met the criteria of real-world use, to more deeply understand the concepts of theoretical and experimental probability. NEAAAT’s 5th-grade science students joined in the PBL utilizing force and motion standards to create cereal box carnival games to add to the community event drawing over 2,000 attendees.
Implementing this kind of design thinking approach, says NEAAAT, helps students become focused and reflective problem solvers who “continually build and strengthen the critical skills necessary to meet future challenges in the global workforce and their communities.”
