New York City Public Schools is one of the few districts in the country that offers a service seal on the transcripts and diplomas of students who have performed service in their communities.
As the coordinator of student activities at Townsend Harris High School, I hope our district is among the first of many. I have seen firsthand how service hours and work-based learning help students 1.) learn about themselves and the people around them 2.)become powerful forces for change in their communities and 3.) set themselves up for a life of personal and professional success.
Here’s how it works.
Self-discovery through service
Service hours are a powerful tool for students to learn about themselves and the people around them. When students get their hands dirty working on projects in the real world, they not only have the opportunity to see how many of the skills they’ve learned in the classroom are applied, they are also exposed to new perspectives and experiences that can challenge their own beliefs or self-image.
Perhaps the most important lesson of self-discovery that we would like students to experience is the realization that they are powerful engines of change—capable of improving their communities and the lives of those around them. As important and empowering as this lesson is, it doesn’t require much more than participating in an effective community improvement effort.
Seeing the difference they’ve made after working to clean up a local park or listening to a younger student they’ve been doing literacy work with talk about how much they love a book they are reading is often all it takes to teach a young person that they can do something to make the world around them better.
Service learning can also help students learn about their strengths, weaknesses and biases. Working on a food drive, for example, a student might learn that they have a real knack for reaching out to the community and soliciting donations, but very little interest or skill in organizing a pantry and taking inventory. This allows them to lean into their strengths more fully or to work on areas where there is room for improvement.
In that same food drive, a student who believes that hunger only affects certain people may be surprised to learn that many people seeking food assistance are hardworking individuals who don’t show any outward signs of struggling with poverty and food insecurity.
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By pushing students outside of familiar environments and into contact with new and diverse people facing unique challenges, service projects offer students new perspectives on their values, beliefs and skills, even if they have never explicitly considered them.
Power of reflection
Sometimes all it takes is a powerful experience for students to learn about the power of their own agency or to reassess their own strengths or biases. More often, however, they need a nudge to dig down into themselves and realize those lessons. That’s why at our school we require students to reflect upon their work-based learning experiences.
The tracking and reporting platform we use for tracking service hours, x2VOL, requires students to enter a reflection by responding to customizable prompts every time they record an activity. Reflection prompts are easy to add to whatever system you’re using.
By asking students to reflect, we encourage them to place their experiences within a context that is specific and important to them. “What surprised you about your experience” may feel like an inconsequential question or even busy work when a student first begins to consider it, but it may lead to an epiphany in which they realize they held a bias they want to move past or need to find ways to improve a particular skill set necessary to the work they cared about and thought they were ready to take on.
When we ask students to reflect, we allow them to understand their reactions to their experiences and invite them to consider the impact they have on the people and world around them. Sometimes those reflections are positive and sometimes they are negative but in either case, they are an important step in students becoming thoughtful and effective changemakers in their lives and the world.
Giving credit
So much of the learning that we hope will take place during service projects is about self-knowledge and the development of characteristics such as intrinsic motivation that are difficult to capture on a transcript. It’s still important that students receive academic credit for their work-based learning experiences, which is why we use a reporting and tracking platform that adds a certified service record to students’ transcripts through Parchment.
The real credit comes from students themselves, however, as they learn about their strengths and ability to do good through service.
