What’s your New Year’s Resolution? Maybe you want to be healthier, or cut down on screen time. Or maybe you want to focus on helping others have a great year. Resolutions are easier to keep with partners to hold you accountable, so it’s with this in mind we offer four ways to jumpstart a year of service-learning with your group or classroom.
1. JOURNAL!
Journaling is useful in the early stages of service-learning to gain insight into how much students know about given topics before a project gets rolling. Journaling also helps gather information about student skills and confidence, and can continue throughout the project as a means of student reflection.
2. Create a Big Idea.
Big Ideas are important and enduring concepts, principles, theories, and processes (Understanding by Design, 1998). In short, a Big Idea is a theme on which a service-learning project is based. (Think Global Warming, the Achievement and Opportunity Gap, or Poverty in the United States – but don’t limit yourself. This is a Big Idea after all.) When closing in on a Big Idea, test it against these questions:
- Can your Big Idea be applied across grade levels?
- Will your Big Idea matter to youth after the project ends?
- Is your Big Idea useful outside of school?
3. Go on a WalkAbout.
A WalkAbout involves making a map of your school neighborhood, and is a great way for students to understand authentic community needs. During the WalkAbout, students should answer these questions:
- Are there safe places for children to spend time after school?
- Do they sense tensions among neighbors?
- What problems or issues do they find in the neighborhood?
If January is too frigid a time to take your class outdoors, use Google Maps (or go old school with hand-drawn maps!) to visualize your neighborhood and help brainstorm.
4. Create SMART Goals.
SMART Goals help identify the most important aspects of a service-learning project (The Power of Smart Goals, 2005). SMART goals should be:
- Specific: Lay out what you will do and how will you do it as clearly as possible.
- Measurable: Decide how you will know if your project was a success.
- Attainable: Be realistic about goals and make sure everyone is on the same page.
- Relevant: Focus on authentic needs and stay true to your Big Idea.
- Tangible: Make sure results are visible to community stakeholders.
So there you have it: four ways to hit the ground running in 2016. As always, more project planning resources can be found in The Generator – NYLC’s project planning tool – at gsn.nylc.org/plan. Happy Service-Learning!