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Ten Steps to Develop and Execute a Service-Learning Strategy

Adapted from Miami Dade College)

1 . Consider the courses you teach and determine how community service might be helpful in enriching learning in that discipline. Service-learning can be effectively used in every academic discipline. Some applications require a little more imagination than others, and often the best are not immediately obvious. At this point, don't worry about whether they will work. Just brainstorm about the application potential to your course. Think about how your course content connects with the community, and what kinds of volunteer opportunities might be available at that linkage point.

2. Contact the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Office of Career Services, or the Public Policy Research Center to discuss and identify community placements that offer experiences that are relevant to your course. Then, based on your own experience and the help of our staff, you can choose the best opportunities for presentation to your students.

3. With service sites or activities in mind, consider your goals and motives in using the application. What are you trying to accomplish for your students, your self, and the community? Review your course objectives to determine those that can be linked to service. Before going further, list two or three specific and measurable service and learning goals and objectives for your initiative . Be clear at this point of your desired destination. "If we don't know where we're going, we're likely to wind up someplace else."

4. Based upon your motives, goals, and objectives, decide how you will incorporate community service into your course. Examples range from a one-time special project (Habitat for Humanity, Special Olympics, bay clean-up) to a forty + hour volunteer commitment to an agency. You can offer the option as extra-credit, an alternative to a library research paper or other required project, or a requirement for course completion. For those who choose to make service-learning a course requirement, promotion or advertisement of your course and its service component will attract students who are motivated to learn in this way.

5. Once you have chosen how service will be incorporated, review and alter your course description and syllabus to reflect the change (see web links that follow). To be successfully integrated, the service experience must be more than just an add-on to an already full syllabus. Identify some readings that might tie the service to specific objectives. Allocate some class time for discussion of the experience even if all students do not participate. By consciously committing to integrating service, up-front and in writing, you are on your way to a successful implementation.

6. On the first day of class, explain and promote the ideas behind including service-learning in your class. Explain the twofold benefits to the student and the community. Make your commitment very clear and encourage them to take advantage of the opportunity for both the personal and academic growth that service affords. Make the decision to volunteer easy and provide specifics on the locations, hours, and length of commitment of each service option. For those offering more extensive term-long commitments, be sure to get your students placed in service early.

7. Work with students to develop specific service and learning objectives for their volunteer experiences. Students must be guided in their development of these objectives so that they are clearly linked with the academic objectives of your course. Most students are not skilled in developing objectives and are not familiar with your specific course learning objectives or how to link them to a seemingly non-academic experience. Typically students will develop more affective objectives (improve self-esteem, feel better about the community) or general non-course related objectives (improve the community, learn about hospice care, learn how to build a house).

To improve fulfillment of your courses' academic goals, you must help them link the service to specific course objectives. In a business course, students working with Habitat for Humanity might learn about managerial communication, or "just-in-time" supply strategies. For a psychology course, the objective might be understanding the dynamics of group formation or gender roles and functioning in a project.

In some cases you may wish to delay this step until after students have been oriented to their volunteer placements so that they have some idea of what kinds of service they will be doing. In other cases, where you are familiar with the placement, you can have them do this prior to the service. Some faculty prescribe the learning and service objectives for the entire class. Establishing these student learning objectives up-front is a critical step in assuring the effectiveness of the service-learning in enriching student learning of course material. This step requires creativity and focus, but success here will lead to better learning.

8. Teach students how to harvest the service experience for knowledge. Experiential learning requires that we learn where we are. We can learn a variety of things in many different situations depending on the questions we are asking. Many of our students are not skilled in this practice. With their learning objectives in mind, students must be taught to focus on these objectives and related questions as they participate in the service setting (participant observation). While the math student is working on a Habitat for Humanity project, she thinks about the algebra or geometry used in developing the architectural plans. The business student may listen to workers' communication patterns and draw conclusions about the managerial structure as he helps patients into the pool at the rehabilitation center. The human relations student observes families interacting as she delivers mail to the hospice patients. Because many students lack experience and confidence in learning in nontraditional, non-classroom environments, we must teach them these skills. One word of paradoxical caution here. While we do want our students prepared and be oriented to service, we must be careful not to over prepare them for their service experience. We all enjoy the adventure of discovery, and we can destroy that for our students by telling them exactly what to expect. Then their experience becomes a comparison instead of an adventure. Give them a good overview and set them free.

9. Link the service experience to your academic course content through deliberate and guided reflection. The practice of reflection is what combines the learning to the service. We cannot assume that learning will automatically result from experience. If it did, we'd all be a lot wiser, wouldn't we? Like us, our students may not learn from their experience. They may even learn the wrong thing or reinforce existing prejudices. Reflection helps prevent this from occurring. Reflection can be in the form of journals, essays, class presentations, analytic papers, art work, drama, dialogue, or any other expressive act. The key to effectiveness is structure and direction. The nature and type of reflection determines its outcome. An unstructured personal journal or group discussion is a great way to elicit affective disclosure. More specific academic outcomes will result from structuring these exercises with specific curriculum related questions. For example, a biology student might be directed to comment on ecological balance in her journal account of an exotic plant removal project at Fairchild Tropical Gardens . Written reflection is a productive approach which helps improve basic communication skills at the same time it leads to critical thinking about the academic focus (through questions) you have prescribed. It is the most common and the least intrusive in terms of taking up class time.

A more powerful, and in many ways more effective, approach is the purposeful dialogue or the reflective class session. This dialogue provides an opportunity for students to share experiences and exchange ideas and critical insights about the information being shared. To achieve academic outcomes, the dialogue while spirited and free should be bounded by the learning objectives of the course. The faculty member must serve both as a facilitator to maintain the flow of ideas and a commentator who jumps on the relevant item and develops it into a teachable moment. This is not an easy task, but with practice the rewards are great. When we seem to be losing control, the process can be threatening, but it is often at these critical moments that the real learning occurs. The real advantage of the reflective session over the written forms is its power to develop a sense of community, which is one of the general goals of service-learning. Whatever form of reflection is chosen, it is important to do it early in the experience to assure that students understand the process. It should then be followed up regularly to monitor their progress. This type of deliberate and guided reflection is what leads to academic learning, improved service, and personal development.

10. Evaluate your service-learning outcomes as you would any other academic product. Remember, students are being graded on the academic product, not their hours of service. Many of us feel uncertain when it comes to evaluating or assessing the outcomes of experiences we did not completely structure or present. By designing flexible measures, however, you can use the same standard used in evaluating any other written or oral presentation: Did the student master the course material? This is the only way to assure academic integrity of the strategy. You may also wish to utilize formative and summative research techniques to measure your success in achieving your objectives. Formative assessment can be achieved through reading student journals with an eye toward answering your initial questions (Are they learning algebra? Is their writing more alive? Is the service setting appropriate?). Periodic quick surveys can provide specific answers to issues such as student satisfaction with the process, utility of experimental techniques, etc. Summative techniques might be employed to compare learning outcomes for service-learning sections with those from traditionally taught sections. For quantitative research, you could collect data on the number and type of people served by your students and the number of hours provided. Collecting stories and gleaning information related to your objectives is a possible qualitative approach. The opportunities for research in the area of service-learning abound, and any contribution to this body of knowledge will help us improve and expand the application of the strategy.