Growing with Christ: Academic Excellence and a Culture of Learning

By Heather Nerem, Head of Academics 

One of the core values of DMC is Growing with Christ (along with Community in Christ and Loving like Christ). I think that of our core values, Growing with Christ is perhaps the easiest to misunderstand. Some might take it to mean an increase in spiritual maturity, and others think about growth in enrollment numbers. In actuality, both of those miss the mark. When we talk about growing with Christ, we mean all our students, faculty, and staff (and prayerfully, parents as well) are being shaped by a deepening relationship with our Creator that is expressed in every area of our lives and who we are as an institution. As a gospel-centered educational institution, this means that pursuing excellence in academics is worship to God. 

Academic excellence, from the perspective of our Biblical Worldview, IS worship and growing with Christ. On the other hand, pursuing excellence apart from God’s story can foster brokenness and misplaced performance motives. We believe that if we create a culture of learning and growth over a culture of performance, we in fact will foster excellence in more impactful ways for the kingdom of God. We outline how we define excellence in the chart below. 

As we develop a culture of learning and growth, we seek to understand the current reality of how our students are growing through the use of multiple data points. Specifically, one of these tools available to help us gauge our progress in academic excellence is standardized testing, known as ISASP (Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress). It is important to know that we use ISASP as a tool to measure a snapshot of a student in a moment of their learning journey, rather than conflating that with the value of the student themself. Testing does more to help us understand where we are than it does to help us understand who we are. As a school, our testing data showed favorable results. 

Since ISASP is statewide, there is data that allows for a comparison between DMCS and other schools around the state. This is not how we use ISASP internally, as we believe it is not an “apples to apples” comparison. However, we do receive plenty of inquiries for this information, so we will include that here. 

The two core areas assessed by ISASP are reading and math proficiency, with intermittent testing in science. As a school, we identified several years ago that with reading and math having far-reaching implications for overall academic performance, we wanted to invest more heavily in these areas. To that end, we created a multi-year plan to provide as robust of resources to our students as possible. This means that we have math and reading specialists who are able to pull students out to work with them specifically on these subjects, and are also able to push in to classrooms, co-teaching with our classroom teachers to provide classroom experiences that meet the needs of our students where they are - those that struggle with math or reading, and those that excel. This is an incredible addition of value for our families, and we couldn’t be more excited about the talented teachers God has brought to our school to fill these positions!

Hopefully this provides a broader perspective on academic excellence at DMC, as well as our vision to go beyond teaching all students to teaching each student.