This volume makes two important contributions: First, it provides a framework grounded in theory and best professional practice that middle and high school teachers, their students, and community partners can use to design, implement, and evaluate service-learning projects that address authentic community needs. Second, it demonstrates ways collaborative service-learning can enhance students' intellectual development, promote their academic achievement, strengthen their citizenship skills, and accelerate the kinds of educational accountability and reform initiatives emphasized in the national educational standards movement, and the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.
Serve and Learn: Implementing and Evaluating Service-Learning in Middle and High Schools:
*provides what may be the only comprehensive guide to implementing, assessing, and celebrating service-learning in today's middle and high schools;
*emphasizes and explicates a collaborative approach to service-learning in which teachers, students, and community partners team together to advance learning and meet genuine community needs;
*demonstrates how service-learning teams use key elements of standards-based education, multiple intelligences theory, and cooperative learning to guide project development, implementation, assessment, and evaluation;
*offers optional designs for service-learning projects that are suitable for use by interns and beginning teachers, as well as by experienced and master teachers, and that can be used in a developmental sequence by school and community partners to build from small, individual projects toward school, system, and community wide projects; and
*includes end-of-chapter activities that help those who use the book as a text to practice the model and its strategies, and use results to create their own service-learning projects.
The book is organized in three parts that present service-learning along a theoretical to practical continuum. Part I lays the foundations for the method by proposing a collaborative model for service-learning. Part II explicates this model and explains the four sets of processes that teams use to commit to a project, cooperatively determine students' project outcomes and ways to measure them, develop learning activities to help students achieve outcomes, and then evaluate their projects and celebrate growth. Part III provides resources for carrying out the collaborative model.
A wide range of educators will find this book useful. Its distinctive contributions and features are particularly valuable for teacher educators, students, and community partners already committed to service-learning projects; to those who are introducing service-learning into their practice; and to instructional supervisors, school administrators, and community agencies seeking to create a climate for service-learning or to enrich initiatives already underway.
