Innovation Proposal

 

Spring Oaks Middle School

2150 Shadowdale Dr.

Houston, TX 77043

 

Dear Members of the CIT,

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As we know 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 undeserved communities and impoverished backgrounds the same opportunities and resources for success after high school as students from more affluent homes.

 

Spring Oaks Middle School is a public, Title I school with 88% Hispanic, 6.5% white, 4.4% African American, and 1% other races demographics. Collectively, 82% of students come from economically disadvantage families, 78% of them are at risk students, and 42% of them have limited English proficiency. These percentages highlight the adverse economic risk factors and support academic correlations in precipitous drops in test performance.

 

As members of the Spring Oaks 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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One of the most important we can do to meet the needs of our school is establishing enrichment programs. Focused on reaching, encouraging, and engaging students in creativity and innovation throughout coding and design application. All of these help to keep them away from unproductive video games, youtubers, or bad influences in the community. 

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Therefore, I propose we motivate students and create the “Techies Club” with a group of 15 to 30 students by using Apple resources and technology.  Providing authentic learning experiences while fostering a growth mindset through apps, robotics, coding, and creativity on iPads via personalized pathway and collaborative work in three phases.

 

Phase one, will be promoting the “Techies Club” in school to bring together an enthusiastic group of learners that will frequently reflected on how improve  the club and recruit new members throughout the school.    

 

Phase Two, will be to provide diverse opportunities or “Free Libre Open Source” (FLOS) to scholars allowing them to pursue and follow their calling.  Leveraging apps on the iPad will help scholars explore and discover new areas along their growth mindset journey.  The FLOS will be small collaborative groups of students, who follow their own agenda from a list of choices such us Swift playground software, coding Spheros BOLT, design apps, craft digital drawing, compose digital music, or record video-clips.

 

Phase Three, Techies club members will dive deeper and focus on research to identify problems/opportunities within the school community and design or prototype innovative and creative digital options to take advantages of the issues. Meanwhile, we invite and involve community and school staff members to replicate the club or be part in any degrees of the process in order to expanded and serve more students.   The club will be have scholars frequently throughout the three phases.  All phases will have a one year cycle in three levels: novice, ambassador, and eminence. 

 

What I hope is to garner your support and to engage other faculty members to join us in this journey and establish this Club, with better technical IT assistance, more materials to change our student’s lives.

Sincerely,

 

Jose Moreno

Math 6th Teacher

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References

1. Jensen, Eric. Teaching with poverty in mind. Alexandria, Va. 2009. Page 10 -16

2. https://www.springbranchisd.com/about/our-goal

3. https://schools.texastribune.org/districts/spring-branch-isd/spring-oaks-middle-school/

4. https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/10/2018-students-and-technology-research-study

5.  https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2017/10/studentitstudy2017.pdf

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