Throughout the current school year, the CivicTREK K-12 cohort of teachers have implemented a service-learning approach to guide their students towards mastery of the Profile of a Virginia Graduate 21st century skills. In our most recent professional development session, teachers:
- shared some of their best-practice “Five C’s” success stories, critiquing and enhancing one another’s work
- planned out ongoing and culminating reflection activities to help their students develop metacognitive skills
- developed a demonstration event for students to share and showcase project outcomes with a public audience.
A few of the success story examples:
“Phase One of my (students’) service-learning project really embodies the idea of COLLABORATION in that the students plan the project from top to bottom with contingencies for obstacles (to even include a contract which monitors behaviors, provides corrective action/steps for students who are not on track, and incorporates parent and student signatures for completion of deadlines). Students create timelines, apply for leadership positions and determine which auspices leadership falls under, create plans of actions, and back-ups, as well as open lines of communication (via different sources — chats/email/etc.).”
“CRITICAL THINKING: my students are working on a project to reduce plastic waste in our school. We began the project by collecting plastic waste used by each of the students and their families within the span of a week. Before dumping out all our collected waste on a large tarp I asked the students how we could sort the waste and what that could teach us. Students proposed sorting waste by plastic type. Students researched the different types of plastic and what those were used for. Next students proposed to sort based on plastic usage such as food waste and packaging. Over the course of 2 days we sorted plastic and weighed it. We created percentages by dividing the weight of the group of plastic by total and multiplying by 100. Students were quite surprised they would be using something they learned in math during a “reading” project!”
“COMMUNICATION: My second-grade students had to conduct a survey to all second-grade classes about the type of trash in their room. They had the opportunity to practice many times, and we also created a script to help our English Language Learners communicate effectively.”
“I am more confident and very excited about the work that was done today,” reflected a participating teacher. “I am ready to start looking toward the culmination of the work the students have done to promote and plan their projects.”
Want to hear more directly from our students and teachers? Mark your calendars and plan to join our students and teachers for the Second Annual CivicTREK Showcase on Wednesday, May 29th, 5 – 6:30 PM, at the Minnie Howard School Media Center.
