Conclusions & Implications
In this study, I had my
23 second-grade students participate in community service learning activities
in hopes of making their learning more purposeful and applicable to real world
situations. Through various data
collection methods and reflective and consistent data analysis, I realized that
community service learning had several unanticipated outcomes. These outcomes resulted from key
components that are not limited to community service learning but for which
community service learning provided a powerful context; a designated audience
for sharing student work and a purpose for collaboration and group
activities. These components
aren’t necessarily always a part of community service learning, yet they were
vital to assisting my students in developing better peer relationships and
increasing their overall engagement and participation with classroom
curriculum. Below I discuss the
important discoveries my students and I made along our community
service-learning journey.
Designated audiences increase student engagement and participation. A designated audience helped my students work more fluently and willingly. Students enjoyed sharing their work with multiple audiences and referenced it as a highlight in their studies. Throughout my research, I have found that students worked more diligently and purposefully when they knew a selected audience would view their work. According to Edrick Macalaguim, who made similar conclusions in his research detailing student voice, “I learned that providing students with an opportunity to be invested in a project where their authentic audience is well defined, gives them a sense of ownership and pride, where if supported, the end products will be masterpieces of beauty,” (Macalaguim, 2010). Not only did my students develop a sense of ownership, they also felt proud of their work when an audience saw it. Their work had more value to them when it was created and crafted with a purpose that involved other people.
It’s also important to note that different types of audiences serve different purposes. Students showed their work to audiences such as a kindergarten classroom, children at Rady’s Children’s Hospital, and students in fifth and sixth grade classrooms. Although my students thoroughly enjoyed showing all audiences their work, they were particularly motivated by older students who were able to provide supportive feedback and ask specific questions about their learning process. Students particularly connected to sharing their work with the fifth grade classroom because it was the same classroom they went to for weekly reading buddies. Students already had a longstanding relationship with the fifth graders and therefore greatly enjoyed sharing their work to them. The fifth grade classroom audience made more of an impact to my students than the kindergarten classroom, where relationships had not previously existed. Our visits to upper grade classrooms were continuously referenced as memorable and impactful events in students’ community service learning journals.
Designated audiences are important because they challenge three core assumptions that are often made in schooling: school is separate from the community, the teacher is the audience (or there is no audience), and schoolwork doesn’t have a purpose beyond a grade. Many schools function as a separate entity and fail to make substantial and longstanding relationships with outside community members and organizations. During my research, a designated audience(s) was selected for each community service-learning project, which allowed a community relationship to be fostered and established that may not have previously existed. During our fire safety project, the local fire station was invited to our school. While setting up this visit, a firefighter stated that, “Schools rarely contact us for visits anymore.” This made me think that schools were once connected to their surrounding community members, but now, possibly due to increased testing, they are losing these relationships. After our visit from the local fire station, the firefighters occasionally stop by and drop off fire safety materials and information. Also, during our school’s recent fire safety inspection, several students recognized and greeted firefighters who had come to school during the previous visit. These students have made connections to community members, showing that their school is not disconnected from their community.
It is common for the educational community to assume that student work only needs to be viewed by the teacher, or worse, by no one at all. Perhaps many educators believe that an audience is not necessary for student learning. I have found this to be untrue. When an audience is not designated for my students’ work, student completion rate is lower, student work time is longer, and student work is of lesser quality. Students put forth minimal effort to complete the task. When an audience was selected, as in our community service learning projects, students completed more tasks, took a shorter amount of time to complete tasks (and then asked for more), and completed works of higher quality. Students knew that I would always be an audience for their work; however, this meant nothing compared to the potential audience of their peers and other children in their community (as in children at Rady’s Children’s Hospital). When students know that what they are doing matters to others, then it matters to them. We should nurture this by demonstrating that, as educators, we wouldn’t have them complete tasks for arbitrary reasons or for the sake of just completing it. We are having them complete tasks because people care about what they’re doing and their work matters to others.
Finally, doing work for an audience challenges the idea that student work doesn’t have a purpose beyond receiving a grade. During our community service learning projects, students completed work that ultimately benefited other communities. In our fire safety project, students created fire safety informational cards, books, and fire escape routes and presented it to kindergarten students. As a result, kindergarten students were able to learn about fire safety and benefited from the interaction. My students’ work was not completed for a grade in a grade book or a report card; it was created with the intention of servicing others. In our children’s hospital project, students worked on gathering, sorting, and graphing activities to be donated to the children at a local hospital. By sorting and graphing, students were able to see exactly how many of each item they had with the purpose of maximizing the donated items and creating the greatest amount of activity bags for the hospitalized children. These hospitalized children benefited from my students’ work and now activities to occupy their time while waiting for various check-ups, procedures, and operations.
Community service learning increases the frequency and quality of student collaboration. Community service learning projects provided students with multiple opportunities to work together and build productive peer relationships. It has helped my students see the importance of immediate classroom community and working together “kindly” to get things done. Community service learning has increased the amount of opportunities students have had to work with each other, and therefore increased their positive disposition towards working in a small group setting. When projects called for output by multiple participants, students quickly jumped in to help each other get things done. They naturally began delegating tasks, which created a greater sense of student ownership to the completed project. According to Keith, student collaboration is where, “The teacher, rather than simply being the provider of information and the evaluator of competence, is the creator of environments where students learn by doing, working with others, and reflecting on their experiences” (1997, p. 138). I found that the less control I exerted over structuring my students’ learning activities and lessons, the more opportunities they had to interact and learn from each other. These findings challenge the assumptions that students aren’t able to complete work/tasks in a group setting and students don’t know how to effectively work together at the primary level.
It is often assumed that students must work independently in order to complete classroom work. With the implementation of community service learning, students have been allowed the opportunity to work on elected tasks with other communities. Since students are working together to achieve a common goal of assisting another community, students are able to focus on the task at hand and are motivated to assist each other in a positive way. Due to the inclusive nature of community service learning, students are required to work as a group, whether it is with their immediate classroom peers or members of the community being serviced. My students increasingly assisted each other, without being prompted. Students continuously referenced their ability to work together as a positive experience, which increased their positive interactions with each other as observed in the classroom setting.
Some educators might believe that students at the second grade level are unable to work effectively in a collaborative group setting. I found the opposite to be true. One of my students, Henry, highlights how second grade students are able to work effectively in this by stating; “I sorted the toys and counted a lot of other things like activity books and stuffed animals, and I put them in groups with my partners Vania and Christopher. I worked kindly and nice with my two partners. The total of the tally marks was forty-seven.” During community service learning, my students were more than able to work together kindly, diplomatically, and successfully. During the fire safety project, students were allowed to choose what group they would like to be a part of. Since they were not forced to work with a certain group of students, they felt ownership and worked productively to complete the chosen task. I observed students assisting other students, unprompted, to complete harder or more time-consuming parts of the task. Students naturally saw they could divvy up work to finish the task within the time limit imposed. In the Children’s Hospital project, students were put into groups, but were allowed to choose their role within the group. Again, students were able to see how working together allowed them to complete work more effectively within a given amount of time. Since all group members were required to give their input in the selection of roles and completion of tasks, students produced higher quality work. Also, as noted in my students’ community service learning journal entries, they began referencing what they accomplished with many more “we” statements as opposed to “I” statements, showing that they understood that it was a group effort as opposed to an individual effort. They viewed themselves as part of a community instead of just an individual.
Community service learning helps students see the purpose of their learning. Through the analysis of student journal entries and class discussion, I saw the students were able to articulate WHY they were learning something and how they could apply it to in the “real world”. Students were able to access several other content areas such as language arts, mathematics, and writing through the use of community service learning. I chose to strategically incorporate community service learning into core content areas to minimize the distraction of distinguishing between the two and to maximize the purposeful student learning. As Howard (1993) states, it is important to “minimize the distinction between students’ community learning role and the classroom learning role” (p. 103).
As standardized testing takes a forefront in our educational society, students are having increased difficulty with explaining why they are being asked to learn something and how it applies to world beyond the classroom doors. Through the fire safety and Children’s Hospital projects, students were able to apply their learning in a purposeful way. Not only did my students understand WHY they were learning something; they realized that their learning could benefit other communities. According to Daniel Pink, author of Drive (2009), purpose is one of the three contributors to internal motivation. He references the “Carrot and Stick” model as an archaic way of thinking in regards to motivating students. With the “Carrot and Stick” model, educators use only carrots and sticks (grades and rewards) to motivate students. According to Pink, students are actually motivated by choice, direction, and how things get accomplished. The significance of this is that at our core, we all want students to be intrinsically motivated, driven by their learning rather than the grade or external sticks and carrots. Through community service learning, I saw students intrinsically motivated to help and to learn because it mattered to them. This just highlights the point that when students care about what they are doing, they don’t need rewards or to be pushed against their will. This is important because we often assume that young students in particular need carrots and sticks to be motivated to learn/do something.
Community service learning helps students demonstrate caring, kind, and empathetic behaviors. It is said that students who have participated in community service learning have been able to demonstrate improvement in areas such as moral reasoning, problem-solving, and empathic understanding (Clary, Snyder, & Stukas, 1999). I have found this to be true in my research as well. Through the various projects, my students were able to observe and practice caring, kind, and empathetic behaviors. They began to help each other without being asked, understanding when someone might need help, and recognizing that some people are in situations that are beyond their control and require consideration and compassion. My research demonstrated that young children are able to develop kind, caring, and empathetic behaviors, especially when given the opportunity.
Community service learning can increase students’ writing proficiency and ability to articulate reflective thoughts. I have historically had difficulty with my students’ writing in terms of elaborating on their thoughts and getting more than three simple sentences on paper. Through community service learning, I realized that my students struggled with writing because they weren’t passionate about the topic. I was prescribing a genre and a prompt to use each and every time. When was I asking my students to just write about what they thought and how they felt? I found that when students are engaged at the task at hand, they produce better work. For my research, community service learning was the motivator at hand. However, any means of purposeful learning could potentially increase student writing and reflection. Students were asked to journal and reflect after several parts of a given community service learning project. This practice became routine and fine-tuned. As a result, students had more to say from a deeper level of thinking. Responses were no longer one or two words and began to fill entire pages. Vania and Octavio’s journal responses illustrate this well. Below you will see the first and final responses from the students’ community service learning journals.
Vania’s First Journal Entry: “I’m excited about helping people and I think community service learning is fun because you help people.”
Vania’s Final Journal Entry: “This week I made a bag and I put toys in it, clothes in it, and all the other things we have. I felt good because helping is good. I like children’s hospital more than fire safety because we are helping the people. We are putting a lot of toys in our bags for the children’s hospital. Today Mrs. Alex came to get the bags we made for Rady Children’s Hospital and we helped her put the bags in her car. I felt happy because she was super nice to us.”
Octavio’s First Journal Entry: “You can help people and I feel happy.”
Octavio’s Last Journal Entry: “I love helping the children’s hospital because it is fun and the kids that are in the hospital get to play. I collected the cars and I counted the activity books. I’ve been doing toys. I loved putting the toy cars where they go. We all sorted things and we talked. I’d love to do it again. I would like to do this for two more years. I feel amazing and great. I’ve been helping children in the hospital. I liked the children’s hospital more than fire safety because you get to help children in the hospital. We made graphs and tables and we showed Mr. Mac the table. I love doing this. I made bags too. I love doing this. I wish I can do it again.”
It’s important to note that not all community service learning programs will increase students’ writing proficiency and ability to articulate reflective thoughts, but if they are structured well and have students reflecting on their learning in conversations and in writing, their proficiency will increase simply because they are writing more and they are writing about things they care about. The broader significance of this finding is that we often think that in order for students to become better writers, we need to create elaborate assignments for them to practice certain types of writing, usually decided by the teacher. I discovered that just giving my students time and support to reflect on their learning helped them develop as writers and as thinkers. The more they wrote, the more they realized what they had learned. According to John Dewey, “To reflect is to look back over what has been done so as to extract the net meanings, which are the capital stock for intelligent dealing with further experiences. It is the heart of intellectual organization and of the disciplined mind” (1938, p. 38-39). The power of reflection and what makes a moment truly educative is its ability to generate further questions that lead to more learning. I saw this as students wrote more and more and as a result, wanted to learn more and more.
Community service learning increases students’ understanding of outside communities and service. I found that community service learning broadened my students’ knowledge of potential outside communities needing service. After participation in community service learning projects, students were beginning to develop the idea that they could be of service to not only their immediate class and family communities, but to others outside of their neighborhood. In the initial survey, students predominately referenced their friends, family members, and pets as communities in need of service. After our community service learning projects, students listed other communities, such as students in other grade levels, patients in hospital, and children outside of their friend and family circles, as communities needing service. Students understood what it meant to help.
This is a powerful outcome because it not only shifted students’ sense of what it means to help, but who to help. They were able to shift from an internal view to an external view because they felt that they could make a difference, which was empowering. This is what all schools want; students to feel empowered to make a contribution to others. I found that community service learning projects help blur the boundaries between school and community. School should provide students with opportunities to do this type of work because it impacts their sense of where they can have an impact, which is far beyond their immediate family and friends.
Community service learning projects help students build self-esteem. Many people agree that service learning can impact students’ emotional development in areas such as personal efficacy, self-esteem, and confidence. According to Clary, Snyder, & Stukas, “It has been found, for example, that cross-age tutoring increased participants’ self-esteem. Similarly, in another study nearly 60% of youth in service programs agreed that the program showed them that it feel good to help others” (1999, p. 3). Throughout my research process, students continually referenced how “proud” they were of themselves and their work. They iterated how community service learning and helping others made them feel “good” and “helpful”. Students enjoyed how community service learning made them feel and therefore wanted to participate in more community service projects.
Students are in dire need of opportunities to build their self-esteem. Schools are currently doing much to hurt children’s confidence levels and their sense of success as learners. The more we focus on tests, the more learning starts to feel like something you are either good or bad at, rather than something everyone does their whole lives. In contrast, community service learning is about process. There may be an end product, but how students get there is just as important. Carol Dweck, a researcher on motivation, writes, “With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they are already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart” (1999, p. 17). Her quote explains the differences between developing a growth mindset (a result of hard work and learning) versus a fixed mindset (an innate ability). Students who develop a growth mindset are more determined and hard working when faced with challenges. Her research has shown that when we focus on learning goals (community service learning), rather than performance goals (tests), there is an emphasis on process and effort vs. final judgment. The former is much better for building self-esteem and helping students see their own areas of strength and working on areas of growth.
Tips for Teachers
Create a prototype to help students see what the final product could look like. Students found greater success in their final products when they were presented a model (prototype) at the onset of the project. The model served as a baseline from which several students were able to create and construct projects that exceeded beginning expectations. This provided to be particularly useful for my visual learners.
Balance student choice with structure and guidance. When my students were presented with unlimited choice and no teacher-created structure, they struggled with even the littlest tasks and had difficulty self-managing. When no student choice was present, students were not as engaged nor motivated. Therefore, it was important to strike a balance between student choice and teacher-guided structure. When balanced, the two complement each other and result in successful community service learning projects and productive group work.
Include a wide variety of activities. In my research, it became even more apparent that each student has his or her own preferred way of learning. Each student made his and her own connection to the community service learning projects. What might not be a highlight or important moment for one student may be a profound experience for another student. Therefore, it is important to include a wide variety of learning opportunities and tasks.
Encourage students to reflect on daily activities. Not only have my students’ reflections given me a better picture of what motivates and engages them in the classroom, it has increased my students’ abilities to articulate their thoughts and to write with greater elaboration and fluency. It is important build in enough time for reflection so that student responses are not rushed and forced.
Identify an audience early in the project process. It is important to set the purpose for a particular project by introducing an audience in the beginning steps. When my students were made aware of the anticipated audience in the early stages, their work throughout the entire process became more meaningful and purposeful.
Find an authentic audience for students’ work. Simply selecting an audience does not mean higher levels of student participation and engagement. An authentic audience, one that is carefully selected for the project, will mean more to students than an arbitrarily selected audience. During of Children’s Hospital project, I strategically selected a fifth grade class as our audience for student work because my students greatly looked up to older students and already had existing relationships with the many of the students due to reading buddies.
_ _ _ _
Designated audiences increase student engagement and participation. A designated audience helped my students work more fluently and willingly. Students enjoyed sharing their work with multiple audiences and referenced it as a highlight in their studies. Throughout my research, I have found that students worked more diligently and purposefully when they knew a selected audience would view their work. According to Edrick Macalaguim, who made similar conclusions in his research detailing student voice, “I learned that providing students with an opportunity to be invested in a project where their authentic audience is well defined, gives them a sense of ownership and pride, where if supported, the end products will be masterpieces of beauty,” (Macalaguim, 2010). Not only did my students develop a sense of ownership, they also felt proud of their work when an audience saw it. Their work had more value to them when it was created and crafted with a purpose that involved other people.
It’s also important to note that different types of audiences serve different purposes. Students showed their work to audiences such as a kindergarten classroom, children at Rady’s Children’s Hospital, and students in fifth and sixth grade classrooms. Although my students thoroughly enjoyed showing all audiences their work, they were particularly motivated by older students who were able to provide supportive feedback and ask specific questions about their learning process. Students particularly connected to sharing their work with the fifth grade classroom because it was the same classroom they went to for weekly reading buddies. Students already had a longstanding relationship with the fifth graders and therefore greatly enjoyed sharing their work to them. The fifth grade classroom audience made more of an impact to my students than the kindergarten classroom, where relationships had not previously existed. Our visits to upper grade classrooms were continuously referenced as memorable and impactful events in students’ community service learning journals.
Designated audiences are important because they challenge three core assumptions that are often made in schooling: school is separate from the community, the teacher is the audience (or there is no audience), and schoolwork doesn’t have a purpose beyond a grade. Many schools function as a separate entity and fail to make substantial and longstanding relationships with outside community members and organizations. During my research, a designated audience(s) was selected for each community service-learning project, which allowed a community relationship to be fostered and established that may not have previously existed. During our fire safety project, the local fire station was invited to our school. While setting up this visit, a firefighter stated that, “Schools rarely contact us for visits anymore.” This made me think that schools were once connected to their surrounding community members, but now, possibly due to increased testing, they are losing these relationships. After our visit from the local fire station, the firefighters occasionally stop by and drop off fire safety materials and information. Also, during our school’s recent fire safety inspection, several students recognized and greeted firefighters who had come to school during the previous visit. These students have made connections to community members, showing that their school is not disconnected from their community.
It is common for the educational community to assume that student work only needs to be viewed by the teacher, or worse, by no one at all. Perhaps many educators believe that an audience is not necessary for student learning. I have found this to be untrue. When an audience is not designated for my students’ work, student completion rate is lower, student work time is longer, and student work is of lesser quality. Students put forth minimal effort to complete the task. When an audience was selected, as in our community service learning projects, students completed more tasks, took a shorter amount of time to complete tasks (and then asked for more), and completed works of higher quality. Students knew that I would always be an audience for their work; however, this meant nothing compared to the potential audience of their peers and other children in their community (as in children at Rady’s Children’s Hospital). When students know that what they are doing matters to others, then it matters to them. We should nurture this by demonstrating that, as educators, we wouldn’t have them complete tasks for arbitrary reasons or for the sake of just completing it. We are having them complete tasks because people care about what they’re doing and their work matters to others.
Finally, doing work for an audience challenges the idea that student work doesn’t have a purpose beyond receiving a grade. During our community service learning projects, students completed work that ultimately benefited other communities. In our fire safety project, students created fire safety informational cards, books, and fire escape routes and presented it to kindergarten students. As a result, kindergarten students were able to learn about fire safety and benefited from the interaction. My students’ work was not completed for a grade in a grade book or a report card; it was created with the intention of servicing others. In our children’s hospital project, students worked on gathering, sorting, and graphing activities to be donated to the children at a local hospital. By sorting and graphing, students were able to see exactly how many of each item they had with the purpose of maximizing the donated items and creating the greatest amount of activity bags for the hospitalized children. These hospitalized children benefited from my students’ work and now activities to occupy their time while waiting for various check-ups, procedures, and operations.
Community service learning increases the frequency and quality of student collaboration. Community service learning projects provided students with multiple opportunities to work together and build productive peer relationships. It has helped my students see the importance of immediate classroom community and working together “kindly” to get things done. Community service learning has increased the amount of opportunities students have had to work with each other, and therefore increased their positive disposition towards working in a small group setting. When projects called for output by multiple participants, students quickly jumped in to help each other get things done. They naturally began delegating tasks, which created a greater sense of student ownership to the completed project. According to Keith, student collaboration is where, “The teacher, rather than simply being the provider of information and the evaluator of competence, is the creator of environments where students learn by doing, working with others, and reflecting on their experiences” (1997, p. 138). I found that the less control I exerted over structuring my students’ learning activities and lessons, the more opportunities they had to interact and learn from each other. These findings challenge the assumptions that students aren’t able to complete work/tasks in a group setting and students don’t know how to effectively work together at the primary level.
It is often assumed that students must work independently in order to complete classroom work. With the implementation of community service learning, students have been allowed the opportunity to work on elected tasks with other communities. Since students are working together to achieve a common goal of assisting another community, students are able to focus on the task at hand and are motivated to assist each other in a positive way. Due to the inclusive nature of community service learning, students are required to work as a group, whether it is with their immediate classroom peers or members of the community being serviced. My students increasingly assisted each other, without being prompted. Students continuously referenced their ability to work together as a positive experience, which increased their positive interactions with each other as observed in the classroom setting.
Some educators might believe that students at the second grade level are unable to work effectively in a collaborative group setting. I found the opposite to be true. One of my students, Henry, highlights how second grade students are able to work effectively in this by stating; “I sorted the toys and counted a lot of other things like activity books and stuffed animals, and I put them in groups with my partners Vania and Christopher. I worked kindly and nice with my two partners. The total of the tally marks was forty-seven.” During community service learning, my students were more than able to work together kindly, diplomatically, and successfully. During the fire safety project, students were allowed to choose what group they would like to be a part of. Since they were not forced to work with a certain group of students, they felt ownership and worked productively to complete the chosen task. I observed students assisting other students, unprompted, to complete harder or more time-consuming parts of the task. Students naturally saw they could divvy up work to finish the task within the time limit imposed. In the Children’s Hospital project, students were put into groups, but were allowed to choose their role within the group. Again, students were able to see how working together allowed them to complete work more effectively within a given amount of time. Since all group members were required to give their input in the selection of roles and completion of tasks, students produced higher quality work. Also, as noted in my students’ community service learning journal entries, they began referencing what they accomplished with many more “we” statements as opposed to “I” statements, showing that they understood that it was a group effort as opposed to an individual effort. They viewed themselves as part of a community instead of just an individual.
Community service learning helps students see the purpose of their learning. Through the analysis of student journal entries and class discussion, I saw the students were able to articulate WHY they were learning something and how they could apply it to in the “real world”. Students were able to access several other content areas such as language arts, mathematics, and writing through the use of community service learning. I chose to strategically incorporate community service learning into core content areas to minimize the distraction of distinguishing between the two and to maximize the purposeful student learning. As Howard (1993) states, it is important to “minimize the distinction between students’ community learning role and the classroom learning role” (p. 103).
As standardized testing takes a forefront in our educational society, students are having increased difficulty with explaining why they are being asked to learn something and how it applies to world beyond the classroom doors. Through the fire safety and Children’s Hospital projects, students were able to apply their learning in a purposeful way. Not only did my students understand WHY they were learning something; they realized that their learning could benefit other communities. According to Daniel Pink, author of Drive (2009), purpose is one of the three contributors to internal motivation. He references the “Carrot and Stick” model as an archaic way of thinking in regards to motivating students. With the “Carrot and Stick” model, educators use only carrots and sticks (grades and rewards) to motivate students. According to Pink, students are actually motivated by choice, direction, and how things get accomplished. The significance of this is that at our core, we all want students to be intrinsically motivated, driven by their learning rather than the grade or external sticks and carrots. Through community service learning, I saw students intrinsically motivated to help and to learn because it mattered to them. This just highlights the point that when students care about what they are doing, they don’t need rewards or to be pushed against their will. This is important because we often assume that young students in particular need carrots and sticks to be motivated to learn/do something.
Community service learning helps students demonstrate caring, kind, and empathetic behaviors. It is said that students who have participated in community service learning have been able to demonstrate improvement in areas such as moral reasoning, problem-solving, and empathic understanding (Clary, Snyder, & Stukas, 1999). I have found this to be true in my research as well. Through the various projects, my students were able to observe and practice caring, kind, and empathetic behaviors. They began to help each other without being asked, understanding when someone might need help, and recognizing that some people are in situations that are beyond their control and require consideration and compassion. My research demonstrated that young children are able to develop kind, caring, and empathetic behaviors, especially when given the opportunity.
Community service learning can increase students’ writing proficiency and ability to articulate reflective thoughts. I have historically had difficulty with my students’ writing in terms of elaborating on their thoughts and getting more than three simple sentences on paper. Through community service learning, I realized that my students struggled with writing because they weren’t passionate about the topic. I was prescribing a genre and a prompt to use each and every time. When was I asking my students to just write about what they thought and how they felt? I found that when students are engaged at the task at hand, they produce better work. For my research, community service learning was the motivator at hand. However, any means of purposeful learning could potentially increase student writing and reflection. Students were asked to journal and reflect after several parts of a given community service learning project. This practice became routine and fine-tuned. As a result, students had more to say from a deeper level of thinking. Responses were no longer one or two words and began to fill entire pages. Vania and Octavio’s journal responses illustrate this well. Below you will see the first and final responses from the students’ community service learning journals.
Vania’s First Journal Entry: “I’m excited about helping people and I think community service learning is fun because you help people.”
Vania’s Final Journal Entry: “This week I made a bag and I put toys in it, clothes in it, and all the other things we have. I felt good because helping is good. I like children’s hospital more than fire safety because we are helping the people. We are putting a lot of toys in our bags for the children’s hospital. Today Mrs. Alex came to get the bags we made for Rady Children’s Hospital and we helped her put the bags in her car. I felt happy because she was super nice to us.”
Octavio’s First Journal Entry: “You can help people and I feel happy.”
Octavio’s Last Journal Entry: “I love helping the children’s hospital because it is fun and the kids that are in the hospital get to play. I collected the cars and I counted the activity books. I’ve been doing toys. I loved putting the toy cars where they go. We all sorted things and we talked. I’d love to do it again. I would like to do this for two more years. I feel amazing and great. I’ve been helping children in the hospital. I liked the children’s hospital more than fire safety because you get to help children in the hospital. We made graphs and tables and we showed Mr. Mac the table. I love doing this. I made bags too. I love doing this. I wish I can do it again.”
It’s important to note that not all community service learning programs will increase students’ writing proficiency and ability to articulate reflective thoughts, but if they are structured well and have students reflecting on their learning in conversations and in writing, their proficiency will increase simply because they are writing more and they are writing about things they care about. The broader significance of this finding is that we often think that in order for students to become better writers, we need to create elaborate assignments for them to practice certain types of writing, usually decided by the teacher. I discovered that just giving my students time and support to reflect on their learning helped them develop as writers and as thinkers. The more they wrote, the more they realized what they had learned. According to John Dewey, “To reflect is to look back over what has been done so as to extract the net meanings, which are the capital stock for intelligent dealing with further experiences. It is the heart of intellectual organization and of the disciplined mind” (1938, p. 38-39). The power of reflection and what makes a moment truly educative is its ability to generate further questions that lead to more learning. I saw this as students wrote more and more and as a result, wanted to learn more and more.
Community service learning increases students’ understanding of outside communities and service. I found that community service learning broadened my students’ knowledge of potential outside communities needing service. After participation in community service learning projects, students were beginning to develop the idea that they could be of service to not only their immediate class and family communities, but to others outside of their neighborhood. In the initial survey, students predominately referenced their friends, family members, and pets as communities in need of service. After our community service learning projects, students listed other communities, such as students in other grade levels, patients in hospital, and children outside of their friend and family circles, as communities needing service. Students understood what it meant to help.
This is a powerful outcome because it not only shifted students’ sense of what it means to help, but who to help. They were able to shift from an internal view to an external view because they felt that they could make a difference, which was empowering. This is what all schools want; students to feel empowered to make a contribution to others. I found that community service learning projects help blur the boundaries between school and community. School should provide students with opportunities to do this type of work because it impacts their sense of where they can have an impact, which is far beyond their immediate family and friends.
Community service learning projects help students build self-esteem. Many people agree that service learning can impact students’ emotional development in areas such as personal efficacy, self-esteem, and confidence. According to Clary, Snyder, & Stukas, “It has been found, for example, that cross-age tutoring increased participants’ self-esteem. Similarly, in another study nearly 60% of youth in service programs agreed that the program showed them that it feel good to help others” (1999, p. 3). Throughout my research process, students continually referenced how “proud” they were of themselves and their work. They iterated how community service learning and helping others made them feel “good” and “helpful”. Students enjoyed how community service learning made them feel and therefore wanted to participate in more community service projects.
Students are in dire need of opportunities to build their self-esteem. Schools are currently doing much to hurt children’s confidence levels and their sense of success as learners. The more we focus on tests, the more learning starts to feel like something you are either good or bad at, rather than something everyone does their whole lives. In contrast, community service learning is about process. There may be an end product, but how students get there is just as important. Carol Dweck, a researcher on motivation, writes, “With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they are already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart” (1999, p. 17). Her quote explains the differences between developing a growth mindset (a result of hard work and learning) versus a fixed mindset (an innate ability). Students who develop a growth mindset are more determined and hard working when faced with challenges. Her research has shown that when we focus on learning goals (community service learning), rather than performance goals (tests), there is an emphasis on process and effort vs. final judgment. The former is much better for building self-esteem and helping students see their own areas of strength and working on areas of growth.
Tips for Teachers
Create a prototype to help students see what the final product could look like. Students found greater success in their final products when they were presented a model (prototype) at the onset of the project. The model served as a baseline from which several students were able to create and construct projects that exceeded beginning expectations. This provided to be particularly useful for my visual learners.
Balance student choice with structure and guidance. When my students were presented with unlimited choice and no teacher-created structure, they struggled with even the littlest tasks and had difficulty self-managing. When no student choice was present, students were not as engaged nor motivated. Therefore, it was important to strike a balance between student choice and teacher-guided structure. When balanced, the two complement each other and result in successful community service learning projects and productive group work.
Include a wide variety of activities. In my research, it became even more apparent that each student has his or her own preferred way of learning. Each student made his and her own connection to the community service learning projects. What might not be a highlight or important moment for one student may be a profound experience for another student. Therefore, it is important to include a wide variety of learning opportunities and tasks.
Encourage students to reflect on daily activities. Not only have my students’ reflections given me a better picture of what motivates and engages them in the classroom, it has increased my students’ abilities to articulate their thoughts and to write with greater elaboration and fluency. It is important build in enough time for reflection so that student responses are not rushed and forced.
Identify an audience early in the project process. It is important to set the purpose for a particular project by introducing an audience in the beginning steps. When my students were made aware of the anticipated audience in the early stages, their work throughout the entire process became more meaningful and purposeful.
Find an authentic audience for students’ work. Simply selecting an audience does not mean higher levels of student participation and engagement. An authentic audience, one that is carefully selected for the project, will mean more to students than an arbitrarily selected audience. During of Children’s Hospital project, I strategically selected a fifth grade class as our audience for student work because my students greatly looked up to older students and already had existing relationships with the many of the students due to reading buddies.
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