Case Study 10C
Service Learning in Practice: Lake Riviera Middle School
E. Janet Czarnecki and Jennifer Lane
You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
—Coach John Wooden
Lake Riviera Middle School (LRMS), located in Brick, New Jersey, is a suburban community with an urban classification. Our school comprises 1,056 students in grades 6 through 8. The school population includes 79 percent white; 14.4 percent Hispanic; 3.3 percent black; 2.7 percent Asian; and 0.6 percent American Indian/Alaskan, Hawaiian Pacific Islander, or multiracial. Twenty-four percent of students are classified as special needs students or have other disabilities that affect their learning. Twenty-six percent of students receive free or reduced-cost lunch. Lake Riviera Middle School embraces diversity as demonstrated by the thirteen various languages spoken within our school community.
At the heart of Lake Riviera Middle School is family. Our building administrators were former teachers, and many of our teachers were former students at Lake. There has always existed a unique and genuine sense of caring at “the Lake,” but in the wake of national school and global crises in the late 1990s, such as the student massacre at Columbine, we began to wonder, “Is this enough?” and “What more can we do to foster prosocial values and actions with our students?”
At the same time, we began to see a change in the profile of our middle school students. They were coming to us with less developed social skills, which showed up, for example, as less respectful behavior toward teachers and fellow students and increasing behavior and discipline problems. The staff decided that we had to take a more active role in addressing these pressing issues, and in the fall of 1999, we formed our Leadership Council and Character Education (CE) Committee. The first order of business was to make character education the keystone in Lake Riviera’s mission, “Aiming for Excellence,” and over time it has become synonymous with our school culture.
In 2008, almost ten years into our commitment to character education, Lake Riviera Middle School formally included the adoption of service learning into our curriculum. This implementation was embraced by all staff, students, and faculty as we attempted to bring learning to life for our students as well as connect our community to the things we were doing inside the classroom.
The objectives of our character education curriculum are as follows:
Character education is the backbone of our philosophy; service learning is the moral component of our character education program. We can put words into action, and our students can understand the “why” of their formal education. Simply put, they are learning so that they can help others. Our program is varied and is open to all who want the opportunity. Some projects exist to solidify classroom concepts, others to embolden positive social behaviors. Many programs originate from teachers, but we have also let the reins go and encouraged students to create their own service learning experiences.
The idea of service had always existed in one way or another at the Lake, through National Junior Honor Society, food drives, and visits to our local nursing home. All that changed with one phone call asking how we could make our character education program “better.” That phone call led us to become a mentee school in a new initiative called PACES through Rutgers University. PACES, a Partnership for Advancing Character Education through Service-Learning, gave us valuable insight on how we could expand our character education program into one of action; and thus a new journey began.
The Beginning
Our first year with the PACES program was our most valuable. To call it a learning experience would be an understatement. First, it was our initial education into the hows and whys of service learning. Second, we learned the concept of “partnering” with other schools and community agencies. This concept has continued to be a theme and continues to challenge us throughout our journey. Lastly, the idea of “reflection” both as a part of planning and as a component of student service learning has helped to shape our program in more ways than we can imagine.
Being a mentee, we learned to listen, a lot. Thankfully, we were partnered with a school identified as a “National Service Learning Leader School” by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Their extensive knowledge was rewarded with national recognition. Although we had doubts, who were we to question how service learning should be done? Their advice led us to believe that all students could be included in service learning projects, so we followed.
Our initial projects were by grade level: sixth grade would align the health curriculum to Kick Butts Week, a community partnership to stop smoking. Seventh grade aligned the science curriculum, specifically the human body, to Family Fun Fitness Night, an evening to promote healthy living and reduce childhood obesity as a community. And eighth grade would use literature to connect with our schoolwide involvement in the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life.
Although these programs were deemed “successful” through attendance, surveys, and commitment levels, they never really fit at the Lake because we hadn’t created them ourselves. They seemed “forced,” and we encountered countless challenges such as inadequate staff buy-in, lack of connection of our prosocial activities to academic objectives, and meaningful student experiences that did not seem to be meaningful to all the students. At the end of that first year, through reflection, we knew we had to keep moving forward, as that core group of teachers truly believed in service learning, yet we didn’t know if or how we could get all the prosocial and academic pieces to fit together.
Our second year in PACES, we were honored to be partnered yet again with a diverse group of schools. Our teachers proved they were up to the challenge, as they proved early on that they had a firm grasp of the content knowledge of service learning. Our teachers began to show a talent for connecting many types of curriculum to service. As our school faculty has been organized into professional learning communities for twenty-five-plus years, we were very familiar with cross-content projects and discovered that we had a knack for creating unique lesson plans to engage the social-emotional concerns of our students.
Because of our unique teaching styles and understanding of the process of planning through reflection, we recreated the idea of the mentor/mentee relationship with two other New Jersey middle schools (one urban and one suburban) and created a cohort of service learning teachers. In this cohort, we felt empowered to rethink our existing projects and helped our fellow team members to think outside the box when it came to planning and implementation. Getting staff and students on board was initially difficult. Although staff had seen the benefits of character education over the past ten years, they were reluctant to go the extra mile for what seemed like just another packaged “student achievement” program. Fortunately, our participation in PACES had helped us identify a core group of teachers who believed in the idea of connecting service to academics and committed themselves to at least “try” one project. Those initial projects in the first year of PACES became the springboard for our entire service learning program.
This partnership gave us the confidence to continue and expand our ever-growing service learning projects. In addition to our original grade-level projects, one of the core team members created a smaller, more focused service learning project—Boy at War: A Springboard to a Patriotic Tribute. This project was introduced differently. Rather than expecting all teachers to be involved in the same way for maximum student involvement, this project stemmed from reading the novel Boy at War, with a service celebration for local veterans. Any teacher, regardless of grade level or subject area, who wanted their students to be a part of this project could, and they were free to develop their own contributions as needed for their student population. Autonomy was important for this project and truly helped its success. While all students read the book Boy at War, their contributions to the Veteran’s Night were varied and unique. Students were proud of their individual contributions, as we found in their reflections. Inviting local veterans was just the start of their goal. They wanted to make a genuine, personal appeal to the sacrifices these men and women made for our county. A simple thank-you was not enough. A formal presentation about how the book made them feel, creative craft stations for the veteran families, and beautiful artwork adorned the school walls. The evening was a great success and led us to our first Promising Practice award from the national Character Education Partnership (CEP). This recognition served as fuel for expanding our prosocial efforts.
With Boy at War, we were getting our footing and a more concrete grasp on what would work for us at LRMS. Family Fun Fitness Night and Kick Butts Week were still part of our program but were retooled through reflection. We still believed in their promise as grade-level projects but did not expect them to see the same success as Boy at War. We were at an impasse and unsure of our next steps in the upcoming year. The core group of teachers was getting bigger, and more teachers wanted to become involved in service learning, but we were unsure how to proceed.
For the school year 2007/8, we were truly proud and honored to be named as a Lead School in the PACES program. The directors of PACES at Rutgers University were very encouraging and saw something in our programs. They reassured us constantly that we were on the right track and knew we had energetic personnel in place to make service learning a meaningful addition to our curriculum. We again mentored our cohorts in the planning stages of service learning projects and offered our reflections of past experiences, guiding our mentees to more specialized projects. We spoke at faculty/staff meetings at their schools and helped them to make the most out of their grant money with shared resources.
The special relationship this cohort shared was an opportunity to have the students meet and discuss their projects with their peers. During the first two years of PACES, the staff members of each respective school would meet diligently in planning and instruction. The LRMS staff felt it was important to have the students connect to each other, allowing their voices to be heard in the process. Part of their reflection time was spent talking to their peers, explaining their own projects and sharing their feelings about service. This opened up an entirely new aspect to us: universality. Allowing different races, genders, and grade-level students to speak about the same topic allowed them to break down the walls of their own education.
We also created two new service learning opportunities: Lil’ Scientists and PIFI (Pay-It-Forward Initiative). Again, both smaller projects provided an open invitation to any student with an interest. Lil’ Scientists would visit a kindergarten class to discuss the importance of healthy hand washing, and PIFI kids would become a service troupe, informing the school about the idea of “paying it forward”—doing good for another without expecting anything in return and carrying out any student-initiated service project. Both projects would see success and evolution in their time, but it was a turning point in our program. These projects were of two ideological beliefs: service learning grounded in curriculum and service learning promoting student autonomy. These two beliefs are not independent of each other but have become intertwined to make our service learning program unique and purposeful, the true definition of prosocial education.
The Rebirth
In the fall of 2007, a few members of the core team went to the Character Education Partnership’s National Forum on Character Education in Washington, D.C. Our attendance was threefold: we were to present our service learning project Boy at War to our peers, accept our Promising Practice Award for the project, and experience as much professional development as the conference had to offer. It was at one of the breakout sessions that we met Catherine Berger Kaye, or as we call her, the “guru” of service learning. CBK was inspiring, engaging, and the shot in the arm we needed to get us on the right track. After attending two separate breakout sessions, she was kind enough to speak with us individually about our program and give us insight and guidance on how we should proceed. This “rebirth,” as we like to call it, inspired us to invent three new programs in the car on the way home from the conference. It also gave us the confidence to break away from our understanding of the traditional model for service learning and become more creative. CBK convinced us that there was no wrong way to offer a service learning opportunity. As long as curriculum was the basis and service was connected, we were getting it right! We reached consensus that smaller projects were more beneficial for our students because they could be more involved in all phases, from identifying school and community needs to be met to planning and evaluating projects, thus increasing their sense of ownership, engagement, and autonomy. So we would just have to offer more of them. We didn’t want to pigeonhole ourselves with huge grade-level projects; we wanted a variety of smaller, all-inclusive opportunities for our diverse learning and cultural subgroups. Step Up! With Service-Learning was born.
Step Up! With Service-Learning became our umbrella initiative, which would house any service learning program developed by either a teacher or student. We reintroduced service learning to the faculty of LRMS upon returning from the national forum with formal data on the success of our programs and asked for their support in developing programs specific to the needs of their students. Their responses were very encouraging; they valued being asked rather than told, and as the students appreciated autonomy, so did the teachers. They have developed a solid foundation of service that is valued in not only the school but the community as well.
Our Programs
LRMS encourages all staff members and students to create or participate in our many-layered service learning (SL) program that has grown exponentially through our participation in PACES. Our SL program, Step Up! With Service Learning, is truly a schoolwide effort that has garnered five CEP Promising Practices: Literature at the Lake, Lil’ Scientists, Laker Delivery System, Book Buddies, and Kettle Creek Crusaders. In addition, Family Fitness Night, Senior Outreach, Pay It Forward (PIFI), Little Lakers Child Care, Marketplace, Senior Outreach, and many other projects round out our extensive SL portfolio. Our journey through SL has been one of trial and error with risk and reward.
Literature at the Lake, our first SL program, connects reading with service. Various age-appropriate novels are read, spawning service projects honoring veterans and celebrating cancer survivors. Lil’ Scientists continues to evolve yearly based on student input and engages eighth-grade students of all ability levels to create engaging lessons for primary grades based in scientific curiosity. Laker Delivery System (LDS) increases the morale and confidence of our special needs community. With the help of the custodial staff, students working in a special needs, self-contained class receive orders bimonthly from teachers for classroom supplies. The benefits of SL are also qualitative as evidenced by LDS student reflections. As one student put it, “I feel really great when we do it because I get to help a lot. I get to talk to a lot of different teachers.”
From 2009, students have been at the helm, designing more innovative service projects. The primary goal of Book Buddies was to encourage both personal literacy and family literacy in our community. With resounding success from their first presentation, promoting literacy in their local community was simply not enough for the Book Buddies. Students began brainstorming a new goal for the program: to promote literacy on a global scale by partnering with Change a Life Uganda. Students encouraged participants and their families to help sponsor a Ugandan child to attend school for one year.
The enthusiasm, engagement, and conservation concerns of students and staff in utilizing the “environmental area” on our school grounds spurred the creation of the Kettle Creek Crusaders (KCC). This unique service learning opportunity allows students to work with local professionals and staff to compile an inventory of indigenous vegetation and wildlife of the Kettle Creek Watershed, which has a tributary on our school campus. Students involved in KCC were the keynote speakers at the thirteenth annual Ocean County Environmental Roundtable and have been recognized by National Environmental Week in their online newsletter at www.eeweek.org.
A host of service projects also address the needs of the larger community. Family Fitness Night and the Vegetable Garden engage the physical education staff and community members to work together to promote healthy lifestyles. Senior Outreach seeks to create bonds, through literature inspiration, between students and our neighbors at Shorrock Gardens, an assisted-living center. The Veterans Day Tribute brought students and veterans together to talk about their experiences and connect on a more personal level.
Our full vision of SL was realized when a global theme emerged in 2010. We are proud to say that students involved in SL projects throughout their tenure at LRMS created the first student-initiated service project, Lock-in for Haiti Relief. A small group of eighth-grade students concerned with the earthquake devastation in Haiti planned and organized a “lock-in.” Usually an overnight experience, at our lock-in, students remained on campus until midnight engaging in a variety of activities. With a fee to attend and fund-raisers throughout the night, students raised $3,000 for Haitian relief. Students involved presented to faculty and the whole student body the need for such an event and thoroughly researched which organizations would benefit the most from our contribution. One of the student organizers stated at the lock-in, “If you look around here tonight you see we have food, we have drinks, a school, clothes, and so much luxury. This is something Haiti has very little, almost nothing, of. That’s why we must take the initiative as a school of character to help and reach out to those much less fortunate than us.” At this point we knew we had accomplished the goals and objectives of our unique SL curriculum.
Who We Are
At LRMS, we describe ourselves as a community of learners engaged in creating a positive moral culture including cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects. Our Leadership Council and CE Committee have consistently worked to instill this moral culture, stressing how to act when no one is looking and how to carry our core values beyond the classroom. Our former Student Council president stated, “Lake Riviera is a family, and character education and service learning are the house we live in.” This message reverberates in student and staff daily behavior and in student-initiated service projects.
The student voice is integral to our success. Students strive to be team captains, managers, and elected representatives for clubs and organizations. Many opportunities exist for all to be involved. For example, in 2009, English language learners (ELLs) participated in The Academy of Leadership and Equity (TALE) at Rutgers University for career and leadership development. The students were empowered by this program to give an emotional service-learning-based presentation to all staff entitled “Many Worlds into One World; Students Educating Teachers,” about the daily struggles of a typical ELL student. Thus, students helped shape instruction and programs.
The wider community is also an active participant in our character education efforts. For example, service learning projects such as Kettle Creek and Senior Outreach have involved over five hundred community members. In addition, two of our community partners, Outback Steakhouse and AMC Theaters, have endowed LRMS with over $10,000 in support for our programs. Local veterans from Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion sponsor events to promote academic achievement and celebrate their service to our country on national holidays. The Kiwanis and Rotary Club have continually served as models and given students the opportunity to develop leadership in our community. Not only has service learning engaged the student community of LRMS, but it has also connected us to the Brick Township community in ways we couldn’t have imagined.
The Proof Is in the Data
LRMS uses data to set new goals as it assesses school culture through a variety of means. The success of the CE and service learning program is evident in the school climate survey from 2010 as 84 percent of students stated, “I am treated with respect by other students at this school.” The adoption of service learning as an instructional strategy came as a result of a faculty focus group study that observed a correlation of service learning with improved student learning. Assessment results have validated their observation. Comparatively, LRMS students who actively participated in SL recorded higher advance/proficient scores on the New Jersey State Assessment of Skills and Knowledge (NJ ASK) for grade 8 as compared with comparable schools (Science: +15 pts., Math: +10.5 pts., and Language Arts: +16.9 pts.). Reflections from the LRMS CE Alumni Scholarship Application prove that positive character traits continue after promotion and through high school. Thank-you notes from graduating high school students provide qualitative evidence of the long-term effect of character building.
The staff consciously reflects on their progress as character builders. Our 2010 student survey says that 96.8 percent of students believe “My teachers think I will be successful.” Not only does the Leadership Council report to the staff on our progress, but it also reports to the larger community. CE reports are reviewed at faculty, unit, and PTA meetings and stress the role of professional development in moving our initiative forward. Moreover, at the midyear unit meetings, every teacher is asked to reflect on his or her success.
With continuous teacher and student self-reflections and assessments, our CE and SL program continues to evolve. Evidence of improved student progress is manifested in a marked annual decrease in suspension rates since the inception of the CE and SL program (19 percent in 1999/00, 8 percent in 2009/10). Also indicative of CE and SL success is the 94.9 percent student attendance rate. This past year, student-led parent–teacher conferences were encouraged across the grade levels in an effort to assess student progress academically, socially, and emotionally.
Recent analysis of past and current NJ ASK 6–8 data of the class of 2010 shows tremendous growth in the general and special education populations respectively. Language Arts NJ ASK figures show vast improvement, as scores rose by 12 percent in the general education group and 16 percent in the special education subgroup over three years. Math scores also showed growth, with a 9 percent increase in general education students and an 8 percent increase in the special education subgroup from seventh to eighth grade alone. This last piece of data conclusively proves that the longer a student has been at LRMS, the more successful he or she becomes.
Just as we value learning in our students, our staff values learning. We have included parents both on our Leadership Council and in our initiatives; we have listened to the student voice by enlarging their roles in our Leadership Council, in demonstrating intrinsic motivation, and in initiating service learning projects. Many ask about our school’s motto: “Aiming for Excellence.” Left open to interpretation, it simply means we ask our students to be the best they can be. However, with the formal adaptation and focus on service learning, our motto has become less about individual achievement and more about students’ exemplary commitment to helping others. CEP honored LRMS in 2010 with a special Profile in Character award, citing how our students “plan, lead, and reflect upon service projects.” We hope our story shows how our students “live” a life of character through service learning. In 2011, LRMS achieved the distinction of being recognized by CEP as a National School of Character.