How do you engage your students? Going back to school over the last year has opened my eyes as to what I really want to focus on for my final Practicum and then my Doctoral Dissertation. I want to know how Service Learning can improve the students' overall engagement in the classroom, as well as mastery of the lesson objective.
I found through my research that service learning based lessons allow the students to apply what they learn and have a higher rate of mastery of the lesson objectives in the end. The case study that I loved, dealt with a shop class. The teacher had two sections of the same class. He opted to used a control in his experiment dealing with service learning. He taught one class the traditional way: Teach the students through demonstration, lecture and formal assessments. The other class was given the objectives of the lesson beforehand and told that they would be doing a project to determine mastery of those objectives. The class that was given the project, had to decided what they would do as a project for the class. The objectives of the lesson were to learn shop safety and proper use of the tools in the shop. They decided that they wanted to make toys for the elementary school next door to the high school. The class met with one class and discussed with the students about what they wanted Santa to bring them. They let the students draw pictures of toys they wanted. After the class met with the younger students, they thought, "It wouldn't be fair to just do this for one class." They decided as a class to make toys for all the elementary classes before Christmas Break. Through journals and observation the teacher was able to see what each student was able to do. He would show the students the proper way to handle the equipment and then let them work on their own. He was there to supervise and monitor what they were doing, but the students had control of the project. They broke the project up into sections. Several students worked on templates for the toys, others worked on cutting, sanding and assembly of the toys. They even asked one art class to help out with the decorations of the toys. The teacher recorded comments from the students stating that they "wished all their classes could be like this." He observed that students that typically in the pass during the year that did not put forth much effort in learning the material were excelling in this project. Throughout the quarter, the teacher did several formal assessments-quizzes and test- over the objectives, and noticed that the class that was doing the service learning project had higher scores on the assessments. Not to say that traditional approach to teaching was not effective in the mastery of the objectives, it just does not allow the students to engage themselves in the way they could. In the end the students finished making over 100 toys and delivered them to the elementary students the day before Christmas Break. They even dressed up like elves. The students were invested in the outcome and worked harder to master the skills needed to complete the project. The teacher rated the students according to what they did throughout the quarter, and even though some students did not fully participate in the interaction with the younger students, they did put forth the effort to help the rest of the class finish the project on time.
So, what does this all mean? Well, for me it speaks volumes about how service learning can be used in the classroom to help a teacher help students master the main objectives of a lesson. Students have to be fully engaged in what they are learning, mainly because they have a problem to solve and they must work to solve it. Service Learning can be done as a cross curricular project, or in individual subjects. It is something that many schools-mainly high schools- are turning towards to engage the students in the lessons. The best way to teach a student about something is to give them the power to oversee the outcome of the lesson. They must be invested in what they are learning in order to grasp the objectives and maintain the information and build their knowledge base.
So, the next time you sit down to design a lesson plan, stop and think about if this lesson could be implemented into a service learning project. Your job as a teacher is to get your students to love learning as much, if not more than you do, and service learning is a great start to that adventure with your students.
