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 Instructional Best Practices for Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: An introduction to the 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.
w/ Joe Brooks and Susan Hessey
 Creating a Social Justice Curriculum: Service-Learning, Civic Engagement, and Community Organizing
DESCRIPTION: This workshop presents a spectrum of community-based learning and challenges participants to think through the politics of their positions as teachers, students, and citizens in their own particular communities. Participants will be asked to map out the matrix of social and political relationships they experience and brainstorm ways in which they might create community-based projects that not only provide service and research, but build communities of commitment for social justice.
w/ Corey Dolgon
Service-Learning Networking Group
DESCRIPTION: A facilitated opportunity to get started connecting to other Institute participants and the organizations they represent or work with.
w/ Pat Haggerty
Site-Level Best Practice for Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: A practical excercise in using the Site Level Best Practices for Service-Learning. The Best Practices have helped educators, administrators, community partners, and students become deeply engaged in service-learning for more than a decade. The facilitators will offer their own insights and explore practical needs and considerations encountered on the road to “institutionalizing" service-learning.
w/ Joe Brooks and Susan Hessey
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.
w/ Beverly Maddox Moon
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.
w/ Pat Haggerty
Making Reflection Journals
DESCRIPTION: In this fun hands-on workshop, we’ll explore several  easy-to-make book forms and how to use them for reflection activities such as writing journal entries and poetry, drawing, and collecting photographs and artifacts. These books can be created quickly with commonly available materials, yet they are pleasing to look at and hold. When students create their own books, it gives them a sense of pride and engagement. This is an activity that students (and teachers!) of all skill levels can complete successfully—no previous experience is necessary. [Click image for a closer look]
w/ Susan Bonthron and Susan Hessey
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.
w/ Susan Bonthron
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.
w/ Jen Cirillo
Never Too Young To Serve
DESCRIPTION: This session chronicles one primary school's journey into the world of service-learning. Changing a school culture from a strong ethic of service into one with a deep appreciation of service-learning as a teaching strategy is not easy. Find out how Bryn Mawr School in Auburn, Massachusetts, is doing just that! Also, hear from the presenter about other service-learning projects with an elementary school focus. See how drama can be used to introduce service-learning through "Ms. Sally and the Service-Learning School Bus", an original production.
w/ Pat Haggerty
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 Place-Based Education:
A Conversation with David Sobel
DESCRIPTION: David is a preeminent voice and writer for integrating place-based education in American schools. He is a core faculty member and director of Teacher Certification programs at Antioch University New England and he was identified as one of the 2007 Daring Dozen educators in the United States by Edutopia Magazine. He has served as a staff development and curriculum consultant for public and independent schools and has been a keynote speaker for many colleges, national conferences, state agencies and environmental organizations. He serves on the editorial board of the journal, Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice and is the author of Children's Special Places, Beyond Ecophobia, Mapmaking with Children, Childhood and Nature and most recently Place- and Community-based Education in Schools. He has written many articles on children and nature including regular essays in Community Works Journal on Place and Education. He is just finishing up a book on parenting children into nature which will be published by Sierra books in winter 2011.
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.
w/ Jen Cirillo,
Shelburne Farms Professional Development Director
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.
w/ Pat Haggerty
Preserving Community: The Guilford Country Store
DESCRIPTION: Good place-based curriculum develops academic skills,preserves community heritage and contributes to the  economic revitalization of the community. When theFriends of Algiers, a community economic redevelopment organization in Guilford,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/ David Sobel and Jen Kramer
School Gardening from a Service-Learning Perspective
 DESCRIPTION: Across the country, thousands of schools 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 explore dynamic images of school gardening and discuss ways in which service-learning can be used to address the challenges of planning and sustaining a school garden program.
w/ Jim Flint
Collaboration: Are You Ready?
DESCRIPTION: Collaboration is an integral aspect of the entire service-learning process as students, educators, community members, and recipients of service work together towards mutually identified goals. If collaboration doesn’t work, we often blame each other and avoid analyzing our own responsibility in the failure. This workshop focuses on strategies for identifying readiness for collaboration, seeking connections to others based on values and ethics and not on tactics, and learning from mistakes. You’ll learn to recognize the skills to bring to the collaborative effort (commitment), and which ones you might want to leave at home (defensiveness).
w/ Beverly Moon
ADDITIONAL WORKSHOPS may be added
FOR MORE INFORMATION GO TO:
Institute Faculty
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