As a Commission, staff and commissioners at ServeWyoming have both a unique and precarious role in promoting service-learning. We find it easy to promote the advantages of service-learning to community-based and afterschool programs, but to schools it is harder because we are not a state education agency. One of our biggest challenges has been to convince the Department of Education that although the federal funding for Learn and Serve America is not huge, the benefits are. In Wyoming, it will take a long time to find evidence that service-learning will make a big impact on the academic success of all students because the current impact is only seen in small, local communities. Therefore, evidence-based research would assuredly help us inform policy-makers and teachers, especially since we don’t believe our commission has the level of expertise needed to be effective in our advocacy efforts. Should the evidence prove that service-learning enhances test scores, what a difference that would make in our discussions with key players! In addition, while the push behind service-learning is geared towards academic success, after school programs that often close the gap between in school and out of school time, play a critical role in service-learning. Our youth are “mines, rich with gems” and using all effective strategies, to extract their ideas and energy, will help us solve the most challenging issues facing our world today.
With the elimination of Learn and Serve America, many of us in the field are left with a lot of questions. One of the unanswered questions is, “What is next?” Two things are clear-we are not done yet and the fight is not over. America’s Service Commissions has recently held its first Youth Engagement work group. They hope to discover best-practices from the 14 state commissions that administer Learn and Serve funding and clarify a role for them to sustain service learning and other youth service opportunities. Nonprofits that work with schools on service-learning, like Kids Consortium, NYSL, and YSA, are also having discussions to determine their role.
It is evident, at events like the National Service Learning Conferences, list serves, and conference calls, that for many people, service-learning is not just a methodology or an approach to learning, but a spirit. It’s the spirit in which we all practice service-learning that gets us excited and underlines the benefits we see emerging in the youth and the field. It is why despite the funding cuts we will continue to find every effective avenue to keep service-learning alive, to finish currently funding programs with a bang, to capture results and stories, maintain partnerships and continue to nurture the enthusiasm of our youth! With this captured energy behind us, we will use this challenge as an opportunity to further legitimize service-learning. This is an opportunity to use all that we have learned, up to this critical moment, towards the services offered and provided by staff, program directors, communities, schools, and most importantly, the students. Hopefully, “What’s next” is answered with, “Just you wait and see!”
Submitted By: Nurieh Glasgow, Program and Training Officer ServeWyoming
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Moving Forward in Service-Learning Practice in K-12: A Case for Infrastructure
The Learn & Serve America program, as we know it, is being eliminated, and service-learning in K-12 practice will now go through a transition period. As we all know by now, the FY 2011 Continuing Appropriations Act signed into law on April 15th eliminated FY 2011 program funding for Learn and Serve America. This means that the LSA program we have all worked on so diligently over the years is now discontinued. Whether the program will return at CNCS in FY2012, whether federal funding from another agency will support K-12 service-learning, or the national effort grows/stagnates/shrinks will depend on efforts we and others take now and in the near future.
Given the funding cut, it can be easy to get depressed about the future of service-learning in schools, but it is important to keep perspective. Congress eliminated many social programs in the final budget; L&SA, therefore, was not the only program impacted. There were also no public reports or statements about L&SA being ineffective as a program; it was a question of funding and we were an easy target given our grant size and scope and the lack of enough key voices speaking on its behalf.
Learn & Serve America as a program at CNCS may be ending for now, but we must remember that this does not mean that service-learning is “over.” There are too many schools, teachers, administrators, students and community partners out there completing meaningful high-quality service-learning and making a difference for all involved for this movement to disappear overnight. Service-learning is fundamentally important to schools and will always remain viable in education in one form or another.
The question is how we will maintain the infrastructure to support these existing high-quality programs—and help new programs get started--when there is no funding at CNCS to accomplish this? It is not difficult to maintain a service-learning program at a school using grants and community support at a moderate scale. But one isolated program without monitoring can easily devolve from existing best practices to “whatever works” on a given day.
We know that service-learning infrastructure is essential. We know that a state-level presence is essential to define and insure quality, to recruit new teachers and programs, to provide ongoing training and technical assistance and program monitoring, to create opportunities for networking and advocacy, to link service-learning programs to current education policy, to help identify and replicate exemplary efforts, and to ensure that activities are truly service-learning. Research states that service-learning does not necessarily have positive impacts on student outcomes, but high-quality service-learning does. The L&SA-funded administrators around the nation were the primary guardians of quality in the complex K-12 service-learning field; what happens when we are gone?
The potential here is a loss of the many gains that we have made over the last 20 years of service-learning practice. Without state-level support and guidance to sustain the field, service-learning quality will likely erode. It was hard enough to maintain quality with the minimal funding that we received from CNCS! Therefore, in moving forward we need to be clear and concise in our messaging that what has been eliminated was an essential component of maintaining service-learning as a quality instructional school-based pedagogy. Service-learning cannot be accomplished meaningfully without infrastructure to support it. It will devolve into programming of disparate quality and consistency in various school programs around the country; some programs will look like service-learning as we know it, but many will be community service, which is fine but does not result in meaningful student outcomes.
If service-learning is to have an impact on academics, drop-out prevention, school climate and turnaround issues (not to mention on communities that are served) then it must be done in a thoughtful, intentional, and organized way. We need to keep this argument at the forefront of our ongoing messaging about the immediate needs of our field based on the potential for widespread loss of program effectiveness in schools due to lack of infrastructure support.
Javier Betancourt, Florida Learn and Serve
Given the funding cut, it can be easy to get depressed about the future of service-learning in schools, but it is important to keep perspective. Congress eliminated many social programs in the final budget; L&SA, therefore, was not the only program impacted. There were also no public reports or statements about L&SA being ineffective as a program; it was a question of funding and we were an easy target given our grant size and scope and the lack of enough key voices speaking on its behalf.
Learn & Serve America as a program at CNCS may be ending for now, but we must remember that this does not mean that service-learning is “over.” There are too many schools, teachers, administrators, students and community partners out there completing meaningful high-quality service-learning and making a difference for all involved for this movement to disappear overnight. Service-learning is fundamentally important to schools and will always remain viable in education in one form or another.
The question is how we will maintain the infrastructure to support these existing high-quality programs—and help new programs get started--when there is no funding at CNCS to accomplish this? It is not difficult to maintain a service-learning program at a school using grants and community support at a moderate scale. But one isolated program without monitoring can easily devolve from existing best practices to “whatever works” on a given day.
We know that service-learning infrastructure is essential. We know that a state-level presence is essential to define and insure quality, to recruit new teachers and programs, to provide ongoing training and technical assistance and program monitoring, to create opportunities for networking and advocacy, to link service-learning programs to current education policy, to help identify and replicate exemplary efforts, and to ensure that activities are truly service-learning. Research states that service-learning does not necessarily have positive impacts on student outcomes, but high-quality service-learning does. The L&SA-funded administrators around the nation were the primary guardians of quality in the complex K-12 service-learning field; what happens when we are gone?
The potential here is a loss of the many gains that we have made over the last 20 years of service-learning practice. Without state-level support and guidance to sustain the field, service-learning quality will likely erode. It was hard enough to maintain quality with the minimal funding that we received from CNCS! Therefore, in moving forward we need to be clear and concise in our messaging that what has been eliminated was an essential component of maintaining service-learning as a quality instructional school-based pedagogy. Service-learning cannot be accomplished meaningfully without infrastructure to support it. It will devolve into programming of disparate quality and consistency in various school programs around the country; some programs will look like service-learning as we know it, but many will be community service, which is fine but does not result in meaningful student outcomes.
If service-learning is to have an impact on academics, drop-out prevention, school climate and turnaround issues (not to mention on communities that are served) then it must be done in a thoughtful, intentional, and organized way. We need to keep this argument at the forefront of our ongoing messaging about the immediate needs of our field based on the potential for widespread loss of program effectiveness in schools due to lack of infrastructure support.
Javier Betancourt, Florida Learn and Serve
The Service-Learning Impact on Teacher Quality
A unique opportunity lies before us. Over the next few years, the United States is expected to lose more than a million teachers due to retirement. At the same time, our current system of teacher preparation and ongoing professional development is woefully inadequate to the task of preparing teachers to deliver 21st century skills in a global economy.
To be successful, the new teachers will need plenty of preparation, including both education in content and instruction and ongoing professional development to hone their skills. They will need to continue learning as new research on effectiveness comes to light. Our democracy needs to both attract and retain more people in teaching professions, especially those who are drawn to the science and the art of teaching. Providing a process for more teachers to learn how to successfully use service-learning can transform the teaching profession, our classrooms, and our communities.
Principals report that service-learning has a positive impact on teacher satisfaction, school climate, academic achievement, and school engagement. Teachers who use service-learning are significantly more likely to use high quality teaching strategies like cooperative learning, participate in projects integrating technology and requiring data collection, use primary resources, and make meaningful connections to the community (Billig, Jesse and Root, 2005).
The Need:
• A review of research (Furco, 2007) indicates that high quality service-learning, because of its utilization of effective, experiential learning strategies, can enhance academic outcomes in such content areas as reading, writing, mathematics, and science. A variety of studies have shown evidence of a range of achievement-related benefits from service-learning, including improved attendance, higher grade point averages, enhanced preparation for the workforce, enhanced awareness and understanding of social issues, greater motivation for learning, and heightened engagement in prosocial behaviors.
• Schools in high poverty areas are less likely to employ service-learning as a teaching strategy, yet research has shown this is a particularly effective pedagogy for use in such schools. Fewer schools serving lower-income communities offer service-learning programs (29 percent versus 36 percent), even though principals at lower-income schools place a higher value on the benefits of service-learning projects (National Youth Leadership Council, 2004).
• In Philadelphia, low socio-economic status students in service-learning classes gained more on math and science standardized tests than their nonparticipating peers. Similar results occurred in Michigan and Texas when service-learning was of high quality (Billig, 2008).
• Service-Learning can significantly reduce the achievement gap between affluent and low-income students. Low-income students who participated in service opportunities and had lengthier participation in service-learning had better school attendance and grades than low-income students who did not participate. (Scales, Roehlkepartain, Neal, Kielsmeier, & Benson, 2006).
• Scales & Roehlkepartain report evidence that service-learning may have particular educational benefits for low-income students and schools. Involvement in service appears to contribute to lessening the achievement gap, with low-income students who serve doing better academically than students who do not serve.
• A review of data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS) suggested that:
o Civic engagement activities raised the odds of graduation and improved high school students’ progress in reading, math, science and history.
o Students who participated in service-learning activities in high school were 22 percentage points more likely to graduate from college than those who did not participate.
o Students who participated in service-learning scored 6.7 percent higher in reading achievement and 5.9 percent higher in science achievement than those who did not participate in service-learning.
o Service-learning makes good teachers.
• Research demonstrates that successful teachers are those who are adequately prepared to use instructional strategies that challenge students to use higher order thinking skills, engage students in solving complex problems, probe for deeper learning, and seek opportunities for students to transfer knowledge from one context to another (Rosenshine & Furst, 1973; Darling-Hammond, Wise, & Pease, 1983; Good & Brophy, 1986; National Research Council, 1999).
• Less well-prepared teachers are less able to manage active, inquiry-oriented classrooms and more likely to resort to easier to manage strategies that rely on passive tasks and workbook activities (Carter & Doyle, 1978; Cooper & Sherk, 1989).
• Active pedagogies and inquiry-based instruction are the very methodologies that develop the 21st century skills our students need to succeed in their communities and workplace. Service-learning effectively addresses these 21st century skills, while also engaging students in their communities and meeting one of the essential, and neglected, functions of schooling: preparing students for active and effective citizenship.
• Service-learning studies have shown a large impact when done well. This pedagogy works because students are more likely to be engaged when their work is challenging, when they have some autonomy, and when they are given meaningful tasks to perform (National Research Council, 2003).
• Teachers that use service-learning in the classroom as a type of positive teaching strategy achieve better results in a variety of academic and behavioral categories than those who don’t (Billig, S. H., Root, S., & Jesse, D. (2005). The relationship between quality indicators of service-learning and student outcomes: Testing professional wisdom. In S. Root, J. Callahan, & S. H. Billig (Eds.), Advances in service-learning research: Vol. 5. Improving service-learning practice: Research on models to enhance impacts (pp. 97–115).
• Yet, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service, of the approximately 53.3 million youth in the US, only 24% of K-12 students have engaged in any kind of service-learning experience, a decline from 32% in 1999.
When teachers and administrators work in a thriving educational system, performance improves, retention is greater, and continuous improvement is evident at every level. Service-learning has been shown to have a significantly positive impact on teacher attitudes, student engagement, and overall school climate. Students’ academic performance, civic engagement, and social-emotional functioning will improve when teachers are equipped with the skills they need to incorporate service-learning as an effective pedagogy. Schools will become vibrant centers of learning which radiate a positive, safe, and caring environment within which all students thrive. Teachers will be more effective, challenged, and energized within their chosen profession. And most importantly, students will emerge from our schools better prepared for success in college and the workplace, skilled in 21st century skills, which will increase their competencies as global citizens who contribute meaningfully to the global economy.
~ Submitted by Teri Dary, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
To be successful, the new teachers will need plenty of preparation, including both education in content and instruction and ongoing professional development to hone their skills. They will need to continue learning as new research on effectiveness comes to light. Our democracy needs to both attract and retain more people in teaching professions, especially those who are drawn to the science and the art of teaching. Providing a process for more teachers to learn how to successfully use service-learning can transform the teaching profession, our classrooms, and our communities.
Principals report that service-learning has a positive impact on teacher satisfaction, school climate, academic achievement, and school engagement. Teachers who use service-learning are significantly more likely to use high quality teaching strategies like cooperative learning, participate in projects integrating technology and requiring data collection, use primary resources, and make meaningful connections to the community (Billig, Jesse and Root, 2005).
The Need:
• A review of research (Furco, 2007) indicates that high quality service-learning, because of its utilization of effective, experiential learning strategies, can enhance academic outcomes in such content areas as reading, writing, mathematics, and science. A variety of studies have shown evidence of a range of achievement-related benefits from service-learning, including improved attendance, higher grade point averages, enhanced preparation for the workforce, enhanced awareness and understanding of social issues, greater motivation for learning, and heightened engagement in prosocial behaviors.
• Schools in high poverty areas are less likely to employ service-learning as a teaching strategy, yet research has shown this is a particularly effective pedagogy for use in such schools. Fewer schools serving lower-income communities offer service-learning programs (29 percent versus 36 percent), even though principals at lower-income schools place a higher value on the benefits of service-learning projects (National Youth Leadership Council, 2004).
• In Philadelphia, low socio-economic status students in service-learning classes gained more on math and science standardized tests than their nonparticipating peers. Similar results occurred in Michigan and Texas when service-learning was of high quality (Billig, 2008).
• Service-Learning can significantly reduce the achievement gap between affluent and low-income students. Low-income students who participated in service opportunities and had lengthier participation in service-learning had better school attendance and grades than low-income students who did not participate. (Scales, Roehlkepartain, Neal, Kielsmeier, & Benson, 2006).
• Scales & Roehlkepartain report evidence that service-learning may have particular educational benefits for low-income students and schools. Involvement in service appears to contribute to lessening the achievement gap, with low-income students who serve doing better academically than students who do not serve.
• A review of data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS) suggested that:
o Civic engagement activities raised the odds of graduation and improved high school students’ progress in reading, math, science and history.
o Students who participated in service-learning activities in high school were 22 percentage points more likely to graduate from college than those who did not participate.
o Students who participated in service-learning scored 6.7 percent higher in reading achievement and 5.9 percent higher in science achievement than those who did not participate in service-learning.
o Service-learning makes good teachers.
• Research demonstrates that successful teachers are those who are adequately prepared to use instructional strategies that challenge students to use higher order thinking skills, engage students in solving complex problems, probe for deeper learning, and seek opportunities for students to transfer knowledge from one context to another (Rosenshine & Furst, 1973; Darling-Hammond, Wise, & Pease, 1983; Good & Brophy, 1986; National Research Council, 1999).
• Less well-prepared teachers are less able to manage active, inquiry-oriented classrooms and more likely to resort to easier to manage strategies that rely on passive tasks and workbook activities (Carter & Doyle, 1978; Cooper & Sherk, 1989).
• Active pedagogies and inquiry-based instruction are the very methodologies that develop the 21st century skills our students need to succeed in their communities and workplace. Service-learning effectively addresses these 21st century skills, while also engaging students in their communities and meeting one of the essential, and neglected, functions of schooling: preparing students for active and effective citizenship.
• Service-learning studies have shown a large impact when done well. This pedagogy works because students are more likely to be engaged when their work is challenging, when they have some autonomy, and when they are given meaningful tasks to perform (National Research Council, 2003).
• Teachers that use service-learning in the classroom as a type of positive teaching strategy achieve better results in a variety of academic and behavioral categories than those who don’t (Billig, S. H., Root, S., & Jesse, D. (2005). The relationship between quality indicators of service-learning and student outcomes: Testing professional wisdom. In S. Root, J. Callahan, & S. H. Billig (Eds.), Advances in service-learning research: Vol. 5. Improving service-learning practice: Research on models to enhance impacts (pp. 97–115).
• Yet, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service, of the approximately 53.3 million youth in the US, only 24% of K-12 students have engaged in any kind of service-learning experience, a decline from 32% in 1999.
When teachers and administrators work in a thriving educational system, performance improves, retention is greater, and continuous improvement is evident at every level. Service-learning has been shown to have a significantly positive impact on teacher attitudes, student engagement, and overall school climate. Students’ academic performance, civic engagement, and social-emotional functioning will improve when teachers are equipped with the skills they need to incorporate service-learning as an effective pedagogy. Schools will become vibrant centers of learning which radiate a positive, safe, and caring environment within which all students thrive. Teachers will be more effective, challenged, and energized within their chosen profession. And most importantly, students will emerge from our schools better prepared for success in college and the workplace, skilled in 21st century skills, which will increase their competencies as global citizens who contribute meaningfully to the global economy.
~ Submitted by Teri Dary, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
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