Service Learning Reflection

This week’s readings helped me to understand that even though the students at my campus are high achievers with families who regularly support them and our campus, they too can benefit from community based service learning projects. Russell (2007) found that service learning projects is a student centered learning activity where students have the opportunity to build leadership and problem solving skills in an hands-on manner (p. 770). It also showed me that I had previously, although unintentionally, helped students participate in a service learning project. With this new knowledge, however, I am now able to see how I could incorporate more community involvement to make the project even better. For the past three years, I have lead an after school club called the Royal …show more content…
That first year, I allowed students to lead the activities as much as possible. They selected officers and had assigned weekly duties. Over time, the students wanted to do more than just talk about books and read. I suggested that they come up with some type of community project. The group generated a couple of ideas: to create a book to share with local elementary school students or to facilitate a book drive and donate the books to a local foster family community. The students ultimately settled for writing the book. After weeks and weeks of very little progress, we resigned ourselves to the fact that maybe this type of project was much more than we could undertake ourselves. In order to help our community, we ultimately decided to take our love of reading and share it with others. After speaking with my principal to see if going off campus during club time was an option, I reached out to the elementary school next door and made a connection with their counselor. She assisted me by finding some struggling readers in first and second grade who could benefit from having some one-on-one reading time. My middle school students would walk next door after school and