• Mission Statement
    Career and Technical Education (CTE) empowers students with the opportunity to grow and thrive in learning environments where they can practically apply the theoretical skills they have acquired in the other academic disciplines. The CTE curriculum provides Wydown Middle School and Clayton High School students with authentic experiences to serve as leaders, collaborate with peers, and interact with industry leaders. CTE students also learn to problem-solve, communicate and think critically through the creation of tangible, real-world, applicable products that interact with and build community.  

    Listed below are the Enduring Understandings of the CTE curriculum. These are statements that summarize important ideas and core processes that are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom.
     
    Enduring Understandings
     
    Technology
    • Creativity and Innovation: Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge and develop innovative products and processes using technology.
    • Communication and Collaboration: Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others.
    • Research and Information Fluency: Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information.
    • Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making: Students use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources.
    • Digital Citizenship: Students understand human, cultural and societal issues related to technology and practice legal and ethical behavior.

    Careers
    • Career Exploration: Students will research, explore, and experience many different career options.
    • College and Career Readiness: Students will be able to work as a team, communicate in many different forms, and understand and applying the skills necessary to become successful in their chosen field. 

    Philosophy
    The mission of the School District of Clayton is to educate, inspire and empower each student to love learning and embrace challenge within a rich and rigorous academic culture. CTE courses, by design, provide students a space and structure to take on leadership, to collaborate, to problem solve and to create something that they have determined is meaningful and important. CTE uniquely has the ability to offer the flexibility and creative space that comes with mixed-age classrooms, mixed-ability classrooms, project-based learning and tangible product development in a way that other disciplines cannot offer. The empowerment that students find as they take ownership of their own hands-on learning is special to CTE.

    The driving purpose within CTE is preparing students to be thinkers and learners in an ever-changing world. CTE is a discipline that inspires student engagement and empowers them to creatively solve problems within authentic learning experiences. Allowing students to pursue their passions increases student engagement and encourages them to pursue learning opportunities. Within CTE, the fields of engineering, journalism, business and family and consumer science (FACS) serve as vehicles for students to bring their learning to life. 

    Students in the School District of Clayton need to have authentic experiences with peer-collaboration, project and task management and real world problem solving. Additionally, as successful collegiate study requires students to engage with their peers in a self-directed, highly motivated manner, early exposure to this model of teaching and learning are essential K-12 experiences. Each classroom provides an environment in which the students take control and master their own learning with a teacher guiding them rather than directing them.