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  Increasing Students’ Engagement and Creativity to Change their Lives

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         By Jose Moreno

 

Overview

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“Student choice is more than simply picking a task. It’s about owning the entire learning process.”                                                                                                                                 John Spencer

“Creativity is the place where only you can go. Your discovery there will be wonderful for you will have discovered yourself.”                                                                    

                                                                                                                                       Catherine Hall Tauginbaugh

 

              Spring Branch ISD became a District of Innovation (DI) with the commitment to the success of Every Child. The transformative goal is for all students to earn a technical, 2-year, or 4-year degree (T-2-4) with a district-wide effort to increase the number of students achieving T-2-4 from 44% to 72% by 2022. A key challenge becomes providing students from underserved communities and impoverished backgrounds the same opportunities and resources for success after high school as students from more affluent homes. 

             

             As members of the Spring Oaks Middle School community, we need to be proactive and responsive to the challenges of the ways we teach. We need to be in tune with the school community and develop understanding on ways children learn. Keeping students engaged is essential to building their ownership of the learning experience and expanding their horizons. We need to gather strategies and foster efforts of perspectives and backgrounds to work towards a common goal. Minimizing the gap is key to boosting academic achievement and preparing students for the future driven by technology, cooperation, creativity, high critical thinkers, and problem-solving skills.

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              Our school is working on remarkable changes to reduce the academic gap when students move from elementary grades into middle school. Many students are unable to meet the requirement of the courses and encounter failure and significant frustration. These are clear circumstances where students find the school boring and pointless. Specially, when students do not have choices and creative activities. Chronic problems are not solve so easily, because the education system has inherited very complex behavior issues for many years.  How can we engage Middle School Students and increase creative activities?

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              When any school requires significant change in human behavior, we need the commitment of hearts and minds collectively, to execute a strategy successfully.  One of the first steps is to focus in all the root causes by combining critical pile of influences into an enormous strategy, to identify the high-leverage behavior that needs to change the organization.  We have to create a strong collaborative environment and speak up about our concerns, because it is part of the values in our school.

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            The goals require a specific action because a high percentage of us do not have a clear idea what we are doing to achieve.  The execution of an activity is very inconsistent, because we lack collaboration, accountability, clarity, and commitment. Most of the time our natural reaction is to fix everything at the same time and we create a tornado. Where we spend most of our energy (>80%) in the urgent activities that are necessary to sustain the school day by day. But we cannot apply anything new and important to move forward the organization.   

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            If we want to create a significant and sustainable result, we have to execute a behavioral - change - strategy and fight in the middle of the daily job and new activities; to change the way of approaching the goals and making a difference. Every single year teachers receive more and more things to do. Some administrations want teachers to do more; the more we try to do, the less we actually accomplish. It is better to focus on less (wildly important goals), so the team can achieve more in quality, consistency, customer experience, and responsiveness.

 

            First action: As an influencer, we have to pave the way and be the first to model in a new method. Because people need the influence from others, in order to be excited to try something different.  It can often have a profound effect on others’ behaviors in favor of changing an organization culture. This is the beginning of my journey where I will work on digital lessons with relevant choices and innovative activities that can turn into actions. Inspiring others to create their ownership to design lessons that create an excellent learning experiences for students.

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            Second action: We have to enlist the power on those who motivate and involve the core of leaders who must implement a new behavior. It is crucial to motivate the influencers first, because they can benefit or affect the plan. Opinion leaders (early adopters) considered highly social connected and very smart people. Over 85% of the people will not adopt new practices until opinion leaders do. That is why we need to find the strength in numbers and know who the actors are? What are their actions? Who are the enablers? Who are disablers? What exactly we want them to do? We need to create a detail plan for the new behavior with clear identification structure that naturally provide coaching, helping, and mentoring every week on the process.

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Enable Influencers: Our school has several members with huge potential to be influencers and help to change the school cultural behavior on the digital lesson implementation with choices and creative enrichment activities.  

 

1) The principal who always inspires and encourages school members to explore and take risks with new ideas, that helps students to be successful.

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2) The transformational learning specialist (Ms. J), who works one – on -one with teachers in the implementation of Its learning platform and google integration. She knows well the school community environment   and she is a strong teacher and leader. She always help and motivate teachers to take ownership in the digitalization process.

  

3) Math 7 teacher (Ms. W) who comes to the meeting with good digital ideas to implement.  She is a fast learner and makes appropriate feedback with her students and teachers.

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4) Science 6 teacher (Ms. G.)  She is a good leader and she has a wealth of practical knowledge with strong connections with students and teachers.

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5) Math 6 teacher (Mr. M). He always seeks to engage students with creative mini-projects and authentic learning experience.  Engaging students in robotics, coding, and prototypes apps in the after school enrichment program.

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            Third action: Use the powerful influencer model (six sources of influence) to develop and apply a robust influence strategy from small to large scale cultural transformations. This influencer model acts as a lens to look at those persistent problems where change seems impossible, because it is a systematic approach to diagnose and implement change.  Joseph Grenny said: "Effective influencers drive change by relying on six different sources of influence strategies at the same time.  Those who succeed predictably and repeatedly don’t differ from others by degrees. They differ exponentially” It is clear that an influencer combines multiple influences into enormous strategy to be more effective and move the organization forward, than a simple solution because it fails.  It is not a secret that to change school habits and behaviors is very challenging process. However, when we are focused on the individual, the community, and the environment by implementing the six sources of influence matrix is 10 times easier to change the school behavior. When we influence an organization, we switch from a controlling style to a social motivational setting; where people have all the opportunities to grow and succeed in a collaborative and solidary environment.  Finally, we believe that creating exceptional student experiences requires the whole staff who care about quality. 

 

Measurable Results

            We will increase 10 % to 40 % the number of teachers how can develop and execute digital lessons with relevant choices and creativity enrichment activities to engage students in the learning process by May 28, 2021.

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            In order to know the progress, we will do individual weekly interviews to different teachers, increasing their confidence to talk.  Second, we will observe every Friday on Itslearning the choices and enrichment of the lessons by grade level to identify backsliding, correct lessons, and demonstrate tangible evidence of improvement.  Finally, on the second week of March, we will create a survey to know if the cultural behavior is moving in the right direction.      

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Vital Behaviors

“It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.”

                                                                                                                                             By Edwards Deming

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1) Volunteer teachers present their lesson design, execution, and observations to colleges and administrators weekly on team meeting and PLC. To inspire and demonstrate the positive impact of the incorporation of choices and creative activities in the digital lesson.

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2) Support teachers step by step on how to develop and deliver daily digital lessons with meaningful choices and creative activities that empower and engage students in an authentic learning experience.

 

3) Promote learning community environments to keep teachers connected, supported, and confident to share ideas and digital lessons with peers, that leverage the learning collaboration.

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Strategies for finding High-leverage Behaviors:

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Notice the obvious:

            The school increased significantly the use of chromes computer by students on the last academic year 2019-2020. When school gave a computer to every student who needed it.  As well the implementation of Itslearning platform by teachers to deliver digital lessons.  The transformational learning specialist has been playing a huge role with professional development individually and with small groups of teachers to empower the digitalization learning.  On the other hand, COVID19 quarantine accelerated the execution of distance learning that forced all teachers to complete online, until the end of the school year. During the pandemic, teachers acquired experiences on distance learning to be better prepare for the coming year.   I believe that our teaching environment is now more open to new changes than before. 

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Identify crucial moments

            The huge gap that 5th grade students come with to middle school created a challenge to reach 6th grade level in Math and Language Arts. Some teachers are more focused on the outcome of the STAAR test, than the process of learning and implementing authentic learning experiences. Team meetings and PLCs are the best scenario to share with teachers and administrator the data and the positive impact on learners of a new behavior.

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Study positive deviants

            Promoting a school enthusiastic teacher to be transformational learning specialist (TLS) was a success. Different teachers who were disengaged with technology, now are working one -on – one with the TLS, who was coaching them step by step to implement the Itslearning platform  and google integration in the digital lessons.  Moreover, the implementation of the Techies Club enrichment program after school to engage students in coding, robotics, and prototype apps has fueled interest on many students with no opportunities to learn these during regular school schedule or outside of the school.  The Math department was more successful than ELA department which struggled every year in the standardize test. This has created more collaboration between departments and more ownership of teachers and administration to find more effective strategies for learners. However, it was not enough to change the school behavior.

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Spot cultural busters

            I think the crucial conversations between teachers, students, and administrators are the most important factor, to define the cultural norms of technology integration in classrooms and outside of the school.  We have to implement clear goals on digital lessons with meaningful engagement of students in authentic learning experiences that improve cooperation, creativity, and high critical thinking to prepare students for their lives. Students require clear mini goals and then rapid feedback to improve their skills to keep them focused and engaged to accelerate learning. ​

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References

Buchler, C.(2012, Dec 17) influencer

Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu7UBY5euBg&feature=youtu.be

 

Cross, J. (2013, March 20). Three myths of behavior change. What you think you know that you don’t Jeni Cross at TEDxCSU.

Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5d8GW6GdR0

 

Deshler, D. (2015, February 17) Using “Vital Behaviors” to Close Performance Gaps.

Retrieved from  https://wheatley.byu.edu/using-vital-behaviors-to-close-performance-gaps/

 

Grenny H, (2009, Sept 29 ) All washed  up!

Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osUwukXSd0k&feature=youtu.be 

 

Grenny, J. (2013, April 26) Change Behavior – Change the World at TEDxBYU

Retrieved from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T9TYz5Uxl0

 

Grenny, J., Maxfield, D., & Shimberg, A., (2013) How to 10X your influence. VitalSmart

 Retrieved from  https://bit.ly/3hTLXbE

 

Grenny, J., Patterson, K.,Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2013) Influencer: The new Science of Leading Change. Second Edition. New York, McGraw-Hill Education.  

 

McChesney, C.,  Covey, S., & Huling, J. (2012) The 4 Discipline of Execution: Achieving  your wildly important goals. New York, Simon & Schuster

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