K-12 Service-Learning Standards for Quality Practice

For decades, the echoes of "quality matters" were evident in many evaluations and research studies. Without fidelity to quality, service-learning does not live up to its promise of positive outcomes; but with quality, significant impacts on participants have been found in the areas of academic performance, civic engagement and responsibility, personal and social skills, career aspirations, reduction of risky behaviors, and more (Billig 2007; Weah 2007). Over the years, quality has been defined in various ways, but only recently has the research base provided strong direction. In Growing to Greatness 2007, we presented the Principles of Effective Practice. This year, we celebrate the collective work of many communities around the country in refining those original principles and translating them into the new K-12 Service-Learning Standards for Quality Practice.

The Process
The road to these standards and indicators began in 1989, with a Wingspread Conference on the principles of practice for combining service and learning. Subsequent significant efforts included the ASLER standards in 1993 (Alliance for Service-Learning Education Reform 1995) and the Essential Elements of Service-Learning in 1998 (National Service-Learning Cooperative 1999) With new research supporting the predictors of impact, new principles of effective practice were drafted last year (Billig 2007).

Since then, the research has been synthesized and extended, and experts convened to draft new standards and indicators based on research and professional judgments. These new standards and indicators then 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 — from Washington DC to Hawaii, from Maine and Minnesota to Florida. The heartland held the most reactor panels: two in Ohio, one in Michigan, one in Illinois, and one in Nebraska. In all, 21 panels took place from July to January. Participation ranged from as few as seven people to as many as 250 in each panel.

The reactor panels used the same standards-setting process that has been used in many states to develop content standards in reading/language arts, mathematics, and science. Each of theses panels considered the work of the two panels before them, revising the standards and indicators to ensure they included the strongest aspects of quality, and to make them clearer, measurable, and actionable. The result of this convergence of research and practice was the development of standards and indicators of quality service-learning practice. In the end, the original eight principles of effective practice and the original 75 indicators became the following eight standards and 35 indicators. While the journey was long, the results were a set of crystallized ideas set forth in simple, attainable, and measurable forms.