Service Learning is a bit of education jargon worth knowing. It describes activities that involve students in structured activities that benefit others while connecting with their school experience in an intentional way.

Service learning usually involves taking students outside the school, but whereas field trips are usually about seeing or experiencing something for the student’s benefit, service learning is usually designed to involve the student in something that both involves learning and benefits someone other than the student.

A small, simple example of community service is common: many kindergarten classes make a trip to a nearby assisted-living home to sing songs and share smiles. To convert this kind of service experience into a service learning oppportunity, a teacher may choose a song that relates to what the children are learning, or ask students to collect data for a survey project.

Scouting programs often include a public service component, and the badges that students earn in these programs usually include specific learning goals. Service learning can also create real reasons for teamwork, offering students leadership opportunities and chances to learn about planning and working with others.

Service learning
is a way
of helping others
for a grade.

The Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools highlights service learning as one of six proven approaches to civic learning in the report Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools. The report suggests some guidelines for high-impact service learning:

• Consciously pursue civic outcomes, rather than seek only to improve academic performance or to promote higher self-esteem
• Allow students to engage in meaningful work on serious public issues; give students a role in choosing and designing their projects
• Provide students with opportunities to reflect on the service work
• Allow students—especially older ones—to pursue political responses to problems consistent with laws that require public schools to be nonpartisan
• See service learning as part of a broader philosophy toward education, not just a program that is adopted for a finite period in a particular course

The National Service Learning Network has compiled a wealth of resources related to service learning.

Updated July 2017, March 2019