|
  Instructional Best Practice for Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: Instructional Best Practices for Service-Learning—designed to create common language and understanding around the use of service-learning as a teaching strategy. The Best Practices form a core part of our work, helping educators (and students) plan, extend, and reflect upon service-learning activities and projects. The Best Practices will also be useful as a way to talk about service-learning within your own institution.
Site-Level Best Practice for Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: The Site Level Best Practices have helped educators, administrators, community partners, and students support long term service-learning efforts for more than a decade. Faculty will offer their own insights and explore practical needs and considerations encountered on the road to supporting and institutionalizing service-learning.
Traveling the Path to Intentional Service-Learning
This workshop will take us inside one teacher’s journey into the world of service-learning, place-based education, and sustainability. Our focus will be on what it was like getting started, beginning to forge community relationships, and working to create student and teacher engagement and buy-in. Along the way we will encounter a host of other surprises, both positive and negative with Peter candidly sharing his successes and willingness to fail along the way.
with Peter McConville
Higher Education and K-12 Partnerships
DESCRIPTION: This workshop offers an opportunity for K-16 and community program participants to explore the exciting possibilities offered by partnerships between higher education, K-12, and community based programs. Examples will be shared, suggestions made, and troubleshooting anticipated.
Moving Service-Learning Ahead through Youth-Run Advisory Boards and Youth Councils
DESCRIPTION: Discover the benefits of youth-run Service-Learning advisory boards. Examine two specific models, one from Massachusetts and one from Maryland, and learn about implementation, how to's, and appropriate forms to use.
Thinking Forward: Meeting the Challenges that Lie Ahead
DESCRIPTION: We will use the collective thinking and experience of the full group to think long term—identifying and problem solving potential roadblocks, unexpected changes, and unforeseen “landscape alterations” that can affect the well being of even the most successful projects and programs.
Service-Learning and Assessment
DESCRIPTION: Assessment is about observing how our students are doing and providing feedback and support so that they can do better. Involving students in the assessment process helps them understand how and why they learn. In this workshop, we’ll look at some techniques for aligning assessment with learning goals in service-learning practice, including deepening the connection between journal writing and service and aligning curricular goals with service and assessment using Connecting Service-Learning to the Curriculum. This workshop begins with a quick resource review. We then look at some powerful assessment models collected by a national study group on service-learning and assessment. The workshop concludes with a lively discussion of how assessing what students learn through service fits into the larger goals of education for Sustainability, and how the reason for learning becomes a powerful motivator for student achievement. We encourage you to bring your questions and dilemmas about assessment for group discussion.
Connecting Students to their Future Through Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: Sustainability provides an integrative concept for service-learning that helps build participants' skills, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs with the goal of creating a better future. Embedded in education for sustainability is a process that is integrative and participatory and that uses long-term thinking to meet curriculum and service goals similar to the best practices of service-learning. In this workshop we will explore this integrative process and how it can deeply enrich service-learning experiences for both teachers and students.
School and Community Gardening: Across the Country and Across the Curriculum
 DESCRIPTION: Thousands of schools across the U.S, have evolved their own unique forms of gardening projects. From bean seeds planted in cups on classroom windowsills to elaborate outdoor nature centers, gardening has many benefits when thoughtfully integrated into the school curriculum. In this interactive workshop, we'll visit dynamic examples of school gardening and discuss ways in which service-learning can be used to address the challenges of planning and sustaining a school or community garden program. As a former national consultant with the National Gardening Association, Jim brings years of experience to the process having worked with educators across the U.S. in a wide variety of settings.
w/ Jim Flint |
|
Global Warming Meets Ecophobia
 DESCRIPTION: Approaching the idea of teaching about climate change and sustainability in a developmental fashion and in a way that creates culture change in schools.
w/ David Sobel
Encountering Sustainability:
a Field Trip at Shelburne Farms
DESCRIPTION: This hands-on field trip will serve as the backdrop for beginning your own investigation into the relationship between service-learning and Sustainability. In the  simplest terms, Sustainability is "meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to do so." With the goals of Sustainability as a motivating force, service-learning provides an ideal strategy for students to become invested in caring for their own communities. During the field trip we will delve into Sustainability's "3 E's" (Environmental Integrity, Economic Vitality, and Social Equity) in a variety of ways. This field trip will help participants begin the Institute with an understanding of the connection between service-learning, Sustainability, and education.
Effective Student Voice in a Classroom and the Implications for Learning
DESCRIPTION: This workshop brings a veteran teacher's first hand experience and professional passion to the question of how we create and nurture meaningful student voice within the constraints of a typical classroom and school. Amid a backdrop of actual project based experiences in the classroom, participants will hear one teacher's candid reflections and specific suggestions.
Participants will also be offered a contiuum of possibile entry points for creating a pedagogical foundation that supports real student voice within the curriculum. Schools are the foundation of our democracy. Service-learning experiences that encourage genuine student voice also create opportunities for leadership. In doing so we increase student engagement, ownership, and ultimately learning outcomes. In this workshop, we will also look at Participatory Action Research as a tool for elevating student voice, its role in "problem-based learning" along wiith some of the dilemmas that this work raises.
with Mary Whalen
Reflection: An Essential Ingredient for Learning
DESCRIPTION: Take a look at how reflection can become the guiding force behind service-learning and how it deepens understanding. Learn and practice a variety of strategies and techniques with veteran service-learning practitioners. Discuss spiral reflection. Engage in the popcorn method, a refection collage, image journaling, and scrapbook documentation. Take a look at how reflection can be based on the multiple intelligences.
Connecting School Based Gardens and Greenhouses to Service-Learning Projects, Curriculum, and Community.
DESCRIPTION: School based agricultural education is on the rise. In this presentation Steve will discuss the many service projects that can be done using both school based gardens as well as greenhouses. These outdoor classrooms provide a perfect environment for providing the hands-on learner a real connection to science, math, health, and english curriculums. Steve will share how he uses Instructional Best Practices in service projects, along with his involvement in a grant using the Learning Kitchen, a six week program teaching students about nutrition and cooking. He will make connections to nutrition and the local food movement. Steve will also discuss his successes and challenges with these projects as well as managing gardens and greenhouse throughout the school year.
with Steven Colangeli
Preserving Community Through Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: Good place-based curriculum develops academic skills,preserves community heritage and contributes to the  economic revitalization of the community. When a local community economic redevelopment organization in Vermont needed help in their attempts to preserve the Guilford Country Store, the 7th and 8th graders at Guilford Central School stepped up to the plate. They developed storyboards, photoshopped historical photos, interviewed seniors and past store owners, learned camera technology and audio recording, and mastered editing software in their creation of a refined 17 minute documentary about the value of turning the store into a community center. The movie is now the lynchpin of the fundraising effort to save the store.
Inspired curriculum can truly serve a social purpose.
w/ Jen Kramer
ADDITIONAL WORKSHOPS will be added
For more information: CWI Summer EAST nstitute Facult |
