Serve and Learn

Implementing and Evaluating Service-learning in Middle and High Schools

Florence Fay Pritchard, George I. Whitehead, III

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135705053
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume makes two important contributions: First, it provides a framework grounded in theory and best professional practice that middle and high school teachers, their students, and community partners can use to design, implement, and evaluate service-learning projects that address authentic community needs. Second, it demonstrates ways collaborative service-learning can enhance students' intellectual development, promote their academic achievement, strengthen their citizenship skills, and accelerate the kinds of educational accountability and reform initiatives emphasized in the national educational standards movement, and the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.

Serve and Learn: Implementing and Evaluating Service-Learning in Middle and High Schools:
*provides what may be the only comprehensive guide to implementing, assessing, and celebrating service-learning in today's middle and high schools;
*emphasizes and explicates a collaborative approach to service-learning in which teachers, students, and community partners team together to advance learning and meet genuine community needs;
*demonstrates how service-learning teams use key elements of standards-based education, multiple intelligences theory, and cooperative learning to guide project development, implementation, assessment, and evaluation;
*offers optional designs for service-learning projects that are suitable for use by interns and beginning teachers, as well as by experienced and master teachers, and that can be used in a developmental sequence by school and community partners to build from small, individual projects toward school, system, and community wide projects; and
*includes end-of-chapter activities that help those who use the book as a text to practice the model and its strategies, and use results to create their own service-learning projects.

The book is organized in three parts that present service-learning along a theoretical to practical continuum. Part I lays the foundations for the method by proposing a collaborative model for service-learning. Part II explicates this model and explains the four sets of processes that teams use to commit to a project, cooperatively determine students' project outcomes and ways to measure them, develop learning activities to help students achieve outcomes, and then evaluate their projects and celebrate growth. Part III provides resources for carrying out the collaborative model.

A wide range of educators will find this book useful. Its distinctive contributions and features are particularly valuable for teacher educators, students, and community partners already committed to service-learning projects; to those who are introducing service-learning into their practice; and to instructional supervisors, school administrators, and community agencies seeking to create a climate for service-learning or to enrich initiatives already underway.

Chapter I:
A Collaborative Model for Service-Learning

“Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.”

~ Lev Vygotsky

Service as a Fundamental Human Value

Human beings provide service in nearly every culture in every corner of the earth. One would be hard pressed to find a group of people who do not commit at some time and in some way to assisting one another. Why is this so? Why does a helping ethic persist in both the best and worst of human living situations? It is likely that our motivations to serve were born in the initial, parent-child experiences of our species. We can speculate that as the first human parents struggled to ensure the survival of their offspring they laid down the template for service. As parents and children came to feel affection and loyalty to one another, loving and caring became an essential feature of their shared situation.

Service is fundamental to our own United States culture. All around us we see that service ranging from direct care-giving through developmental nurture to civic participation and social problem-solving is an integral part of the social fabric. Service functions as a structuring element in religion, imbues the goals and activities of health, education and social welfare agencies, provides the dynamic for cultural and environmental preservation, and motivates individuals to engage in political leadership. We speak of people who work in these service fields as members of the “helping professions,” and hold to the belief that although they are paid for their work, they do not work for pay, but rather seek to help their fellow human beings toward self-actualization.

Service as an Element in Education

In light of the importance of service to our society, it is not surprising that schools—universities and colleges, elementary, middle and high schools—increasingly include student service in their programs. Many of these institutions encourage students to perform service in their communities, and some are taking the concept of service to a new level. They are exploring a creative new perspective on service that is uniquely consistent with their educative missions, an approach that has come to be known as service-learning.

Defining Service-Learning

The essential features of contemporary service-learning first appear in the 1993 National and Community Service Trust Act. That act characterizes service-learning as an educational experience

• under which students learn and develop through active participation in thoughtfully organized service experiences that meet actual community needs and that are coordinated in collaboration with school and community;

• that is integrated into the students’ academic curriculum or provides structured time for the students to think, talk, or write about what they did and saw during the actual service activity;

• that provides students with opportunities to use newly acquired skills and knowledge in real-life situations in their own communities; and

• that enhances what is taught in school by extending students’ learning beyond the classroom and into the community and helps to foster the development of a sense of caring for others.

(Schine, 1997, p. 188)

The Compact for Learning and Citizenship (CLC; 2001), a project of the Education Commission of the States, amplifies the Trust Act definition of service-learning by discriminating it from community service.

Service-learning…has documented benefits that extend well beyond what is normally termed “community service.” It combines service to the community with indepth student learning in a way that can benefit students, schools and community members.

An effective service-learning project is carefully planned by educators and meets an authentic need in the community. In addition, there are continuous links between classroom instruction and the actual service as it progresses. The service project involves activities that students themselves help plan in collaboration with school and community members. In addition, students have decision making and problem-solving capabilities within the project to foster a sense of ownership. A crucial component of the learning process is structured time to allow students to reflect upon their service experiences. The primary difference between community service and service-learning, then, is the latter’s ongoing connection to the curriculum and the education setting itself. (p. 6)

Taken together, these two definitions identify four fundamentals of service-learning:

• Students provide service to meet authentic needs.

• Service links through deliberate planning to the subject matter students are studying and the skills and knowledge they are developing in school.

• Students reflect on the service they provide.

• Service-learning is coordinated in collaboration with the community.

Additionally, the two definitions make clear that service-learning involves both social and psychological elements. It is a teaching and learning method that can aid students’ growth as community members and contributors, and as individuals. The Trust Act definition speaks of service-learning as a method that “helps foster the development of a sense of caring for others,” and the CLC definition makes clear that within service-learning, students have opportunities to exercise decision-making and problem-solving skills. Finally, the two definitions reveal an evolution of expectations for student involvement in service-learning. The Trust Act definition speaks of their “active participation,” and their use of school skills in the community. The CLC definition calls for student involvement in collaboratively planning service activities and developing a sense of project ownership.

In 2002, the National Commission on Service-Learning chaired by Senator John Glenn published Learning In Deed: The Power of Service-Learning for American Schools. The executive summary of this report explains what the Commission means by service-learning. First, the summary discriminates service-learning from volunteerism and various forms of community service. (Implementing Quality Service Learning Section, para. 2).

School-based service-learning is not…

• a volunteer or community service program with no ties to academics.

• an add-on to the existing curriculum.

• logging a certain number of service hours in order to graduate.

• one-sided—benefiting either the students or the community.

• compensatory service assigned as a form of punishment by the courts or school administrators.

• only for high school and college students.

Next, the summary defines service-learning as “a teaching learning approach that integrates community service with academic studies to enrich learning, teach civic responsibility and strengthen communities” (The Promise of Service-Learning, para. 8). The summary then operationalizes this definition by emphasizing that “service-learning is effective only when students address real unmet needs or issues in a community and when young people are actively involved in decision-making at all levels of the process” (Implementing Quality Service-Learning, para. 2). These National Commission attributes of service-learning can be integrated in the following comprehensive definition:

Service-learning is a teaching and learning approach that integrates community service with academic studies to enrich learning, teach civic responsibility and strengthen communities. It engages students in addressing real unmet needs or issues in a community and actively involves them in decision-making at all levels of the process.

This comprehensive definition includes the core concepts in the Trust Act and CLC definitions of service-learning as well as the central thrust of the many definitions used across the country today. It also provides the foundation for this book’s proposals for the use of service-learning by middle- and high-school teachers, their students and community partners.

Why Use Service-Learning?

Among the many benefits that service-learning practitioners across the country identify, four in particular help demonstrate the method’s value. The first is its power to enhance students’ cognitive development—their intellectual capacities. Learning theory makes clear that the kinds of experience-based activities in which students engage when they use service-learning can stimulate the development of their capacities for thought. A second benefit is service-learning’s potential to increase student’s academic achievement. Research suggests that students who learn as they serve may be more motivated to learn and may perform better in their academic subjects. A third benefit of service-learning is its potential for strengthening students’ citizenship education, their sense of community responsibility and their abilities to participate as citizens. Service-learning’s imperative that students and community partners work together to address real issues is education for democracy, and research again suggests that it helps students understand and enact civic values. A fourth benefit of service-learning is its potential for accelerating school reform. Service-learning can transform the processes of schooling so that students build knowledge, skill and understanding through active problem-solving rather than through passive information consumption and imitative learning. A more detailed look at these four benefits of service-learning helps build the case for its use.

Service-Learning Can Enhance Intellectual Development

Service-learning has the potential to increase students’ capacities for thought because it is a form of constructivist learning. Students who engage in collaborative problem-sol...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter I: A Collaborative Model for Service-Learning
• Chapter II: Designs for Service-Learning Projects in Middle and High Schools
• Chapter III: Preparing to Use Service-Learning
• Chapter IV: Committing to a Service-Learning Project
• Chapter V: Setting Goals in a Student Outcomes Plan
• Chapter VI: Linking Service and Learning With Reflective Learning Experiences
• Chapter VII: Evaluating Projects and Celebrating Growth
• Chapter VIII: Strategies for Encouraging Commitment to Projects
• Chapter IX: Strategies for Measuring Student Outcomes
• Chapter X: Strategies for Designing Reflective Learning Experiences
• Chapter XI: Strategies for Evaluating Projects and Celebrating Growth
• Chapter XII: Additional Resources for Service-Learning
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index