End of Year: Lessons Learned, Service-Learning Celebrated!

Amid all the end-of-year activities, take a moment (or two or more) to pause, reflect, and celebrate the good work accomplished. This is the process of culmination. "Culminate" comes from the Latin root crown and means to reach the highest point. After all your service-learning efforts, reward yourself, your students and all involved by making time for this essential process.

Where to begin? Apply what we know to be true about service-learning: reflection matters. This is the cornerstone of your end-of-year activities: To reflect and assess, to demonstrate to others, to recognize and celebrate all that has occurred.

Consider a conversation to reflect with your school faculty and administrators, program staff, students, and community partners, using such questions as:

• What have we learned?
• How has this work changed how I teach or learn?
• How have our service-learning activities advanced students' academic and civic proficiencies?
• What key questions will help us offer better service-learning experiences next year?

Be sure to assess such service-learning elements as:

• Student learning (skills developed, relationships, application of information acquired),
• Impact of service (the contribution matching the need), and
• The process (student involvement in planning, decisions, and ideas for next time).

And of course: engage the community through demonstration, celebration, and recognition!

Gather Community Partners. Invite all the players and honored guests, such as district leaders, local and state public officials, and members of the media, for a celebration festival. Students will have many suggestions for sharing their good work in creative ways. They may choose to design a memento of their projects and activities to give each person who played a role-large or small-in their success. Suggestion: Use quotes as part of the event or on the mementos for inspiration. How about:

• "From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life." (Arthur Ashe)
• "They always say that things change with time. But actually you have to change things yourself." (Andy Warhol)
• "Life is an exciting business and most exciting when it is lived for others." (Helen Keller)

Spread the Word. Who should you tell? Brainstorm with students to decide who in the community needs to know about what has been accomplished. Proceed to craft ideas for telling students' service-learning stories, complete with photos, data, remarks from participants, and dynamic, colorful writing. Always emphasize students' academic growth and mastery of standards. Encourage students to bring their images to life! Submit stories to school and local newspapers, send to the superintendent, school board members, local officials, partner agencies for their publications, chamber of commerce, local service organizations, other schools, and service-learning organizations (see below). Seek out media coverage. Be a part of the service-learning buzz by getting your story told. If you receive funding to support service-learning, be sure to acknowledge your funder (such as Learn and Serve America) when speaking to the media.

Offer Visions of Service. Students have mastered the art of creating display boards beginning in elementary school. How about creating and placing your service-learning displays in public venues as a way to inform and culminate? Consider placement possibilities: libraries, city hall, banks, community centers-wherever people congregate. Each "display opening" offers an opportunity to have a reception where students share stories, loud and clear, so the service-learning ripple takes effect.

The service-learning process affords a myriad of possibilities and options to culminate your important and significant work. And all along the way, even at year's end, students continue to develop the skills, resources, creativity, and knowledge that confirm that the practice of service-learning is completely worthwhile.

Cathryn Berger Kaye, M.A.
National Service Learning Consultant

Visit her website, http://www.abcdbooks.org/, click on Curriculum and find Quotable Quotes among other free service-learning curriculum offerings. Cathryn can be reached at cbkaye@aol.org. You can submit your service-learning stories to the National Service-Learning Partnership at nslp@aed.org.

Cathryn Berger Kaye is a service-learning consultant and author of The Complete Guide to Service Learning.