Standards

Work to establish standards and indicators for service learning began in 1989 at the Wingspread Conference on the principles of practice for combining service and learning. Further efforts included the Subsequent significant efforts included the Alliance for Service Learning Education Reform standards in 1993 and the Essential Elements of Service Learning in 1998. Over the past decade, research on service learning has been synthesized and significantly extended.

Since 2003, the National Youth Leadership Council has released an annual report on the state of service learning, entitled Growing to Greatness. Each report traces the development of service learning standards and suggests specific research-based practices to improve student outcomes.

These efforts include the development of new standards and indicators, as described in the K-12 Service Learning Standards for Quality Practice. According to the National Youth Leadership Council, these were vetted through a series of ‘reactor panels’ made up of young people, teachers, school and district administrators, community members, staff from community-based organizations, policy-makers, and others interested in service-learning. These gatherings, all of which followed the same format, were held across the country. In all, 21 panels took place.

The result of this work was the development of eight standards for service learning, as well as 35 indicators. The standards include:

• Service learning actively engages participants in meaningful and personally relevant service activities
• Service learning is intentionally used as an instructional strategy to meet learning goals and/or content standards
• Service learning incorporates multiple challenging reflection activities that are ongoing and that prompt deep thinking and analysis about oneself and one’s relationship to society
• Service learning promotes understanding of diversity and mutual respect among all participants
• Service learning provides youth with a strong voice in planning, implementing, and evaluating service learning experiences with guidance from adults
• Service learning partnerships are collaborative, mutually beneficial, and address community needs
• Service learning engages participants in an ongoing process to assess the quality of implementation and progress toward meeting specified goals, and uses results for improvement and sustainability
• Service learning has sufficient duration and intensity to address community needs and meet specified outcomes

Across the country, many states have worked to integrate service learning projects with their content area state standards or to relate them to national standards, such as the ones in place for civics and government. Others have made service learning an integral part of education; in Maryland, for instance, high school students must complete 75 hours of service learning as a high school graduation requirement.