Service-Learning Australia

Service-learning practitioners have always understood the importance of identifying the elements that are necessary to develop good quality service-learning.  In 1989, more than seventy organizations collaborated to produce the Wingspread Ten Principals of Good Service-Learning.  In the mid 1990s the Essential Elements of Service-Learning were developed.  However recent research shows that while some of the Essential Elements predicted outcomes for students undertaking service-learning, others did not, so in April 2008, the National Youth Leadership Council in the U.S.A. released the K-12 Service-Learning Standards for Quality Practice.  It is important to design any service-learning activity with these standards in mind.  Very briefly, these standards indicate that good quality service-learning:

• Is meaningful, 
• Links to the curriculum, 
• Is of sufficient intensity and duration, 
• Incorporates cognitively challenging reflection,
• Includes student direction, 
• Develops mutually beneficial partnerships, 
• Promotes understanding of diversity and 
• Includes progress and process monitoring.

  A full description of the standards is in the Standards for Quality Section of this Module.  

The process used to set the quality standards included gathering high-quality research studies in K-12 service-learning; summarising studies from the broader field of education on related topics; convening experts to draft the initial set of standards and indicators; facilitating reactor panels across the United States with youth, teachers, school and community-based organization administrators, community members, service-learning organization members and others to examine the standards and indicators in detail and “tune” them to ensure they were able to be implemented; and finalising them by mapping them back onto the research to ensure alignment and changing the language for consistency.