Service Learning

Last year I read a book called "The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl" by Stacy McAnulty. It's a charming story about a girl with an extraordinary mathematical gift and her trials and tribulations when she begins attending a public middle school for the first time in 7th grade. I highly recommend this book and spoke about it with my students several times as I was reading it.

Part of the story involves a service learning opportunity that Lucy, the story's protagonist, is involved in. Lucy's class finds out that they are expected to work in groups of 3 or 4 to identify a need in their community and find a solution for it as their service project. Oh man - did this sound AMAZING to me! One thing I have always found challenging about doing service learning in the classroom is trying to find something that all 88 students can participate in. It kind of defeats the purpose of service learning, because students are more or less forced into it. It just ends up feeling inauthentic. Most  students choose to participate half-heartedly in the service learning.  Some do an amazing job, and some don't do it at all. It's just not the ideal way for students to learn through service. The idea from this book seems so much more authentic, and relevant.  Especially when one of our goals for service learning is to help students become more aware of ways that they can serve their community.

Elizabeth Soloman has created a Service Ladder for IB schools that can be used for students to reflect on and self-assess their own journey in service learning.

As I see it, our job as educators is to move students along this ladder by providing mentorship and opportunities for service learning throughout the school year.

My amazing team is willing to give this new model a try and while we don't have all of the details fleshed out, it's looking like we are going to begin by opening it up for students to form their own groups of 3 or 4 and then together, identify their own commitment to the community. Students should be grouping with other like-minded students (kids who like animals group together, kids who like sports group together, etc) but more than likely, some of our students will group together based on existing friendships, and that's OK for now.

We are going to be looking mainly for projects that involve direct service, based on student action - reading to the elderly, tutoring younger students, cleaning up trash, or volunteering at the local soup kitchen -- projects where the student is giving of his or her time to interact directly with the needs of the community.

Each student group will choose a teacher to mentor them through their project. We will scaffold the guidelines for the project to include due dates and check-ins throughout the year to keep students moving along, and it's possible that we will be able to use our school's LMS and reporting system, Managebac, to share student progress with parents.

At the end of the year, we will be looking to have student groups share their experience in a public forum - either by facilitating a workshop for other students, or speaking publicly about it in a TED-style talk.

There is so much we still have to figure out in how to make this work, but I already look forward to working with my team in August to launch this model and get it off the ground with our students next year. Any ideas and suggestions are welcome!