Overall, this project was well done. You selected good issues, connected them well to the curriculum, and drew on course resources to demonstrate how your plans represented accepted good practice in community engagement learning.
The best papers shared a number of feature including:
A clear connection to important social issues. These papers identified the issues, showed why they were important and explained ways to connect them to students, to help students see direct relevance in addressing them. The best papers drew on a range of outside sources to demonstrate the importance of the issue and some basic information about it. On student, for example, drew on information from Immigration Canada and the Pearson Foundation to illustrate growing diversity in Canada in general and Canadian schools in particular. A clear and well articulated connection to the curriculum. These papers went beyond simply listing curricular outcomes that were generally connected to the issues involved to showing specific ways their plan addressed key elements of curricular outcomes. For example, one student developed a project for the grade six curriculum focused on welcoming international newcomers to school. She went through each unit of the curriculum providing specific examples of how the project might be used to meet specific outcomes. Making specific use of course activities and materials in the design of the plan. Several papers, for example, took the stages outlined in the article by Penney Clark as a framework for designing their own project. A number drew on other relevant assigned readings and the most impressive went beyond this to draw on other professional literature both from the field of social studies and elsewhere. Giving students some choice in developing their own ways to engage around the issue identified. Several of the readings suggest that student interest and achievement increase when they have voice in deciding how to engage. While all projects identified the issues or concern that students would address, a number outlined alternative ways that students might engage or found other ways to allow student voice in the project. The very best projects focused on providing a framework for students to do their own learning about the issue and make their own decisions about how to address it. In this context students developed specific guidelines for students as to how to investigate the issue and collect data for making their choices. One project on responding to the recent typhoon in the Philippines, for example, developed a chart as a guide for students to assess the work of various aid agencies to assess which were more or less effective. The students could then choose which to support. Another project included a set of steps to lead students through a study of homelessness in their community and develop a range of responses to it. One thing I really liked about this project was it allowed students to come up with different ways to take action and did not force all into the same activities. Going beyond general description to working out specific lesson and project plans including suggested materials. The very best projects identified a range of specific material for students to work with in pursuing their projects.
Weaker papers were characterized by:
The biggest issue I had here was projects that did all the work for the students. These projects identified the issue, selected the information for presentation, decided on the action students would take, and the products they would produce. Some projects did this while specifically mention that a clear criterion for successful projects set out in several of the course readings was the importance of student choice and ownership. It is possible to identify the issue and then let students investigate it themselves and decide on ways of proceeding. Your role then becomes not so much telling them what they have to do as designing good guidelines for collecting and assessing information and clear processes for making decisions about what to do. If you do everything for them and force everyone to respond in the same way, the issue is really yours, not theirs. There is a lot of civic learning that takes place in figuring out how to address issues, dont take that away by doing it yourself. For some, the service was the central theme and more detail was provided describing it than describing the civic learning that was expected. For school civic engagement projects, the key focus is civic learning; the engagement/service is a vehicle for that. Dont forget that order of priority. Very general directions to students of equally general comments about that to tech. Statements like research a charity or teach the background information are not, in themselves very helpful. It is a good idea to have students investigate community partners but you need to provide guidance for doing that a frame work, set of key questions or the like to scaffold students through the experience. It is also a good idea to teach or provide the opportunity to learn background information but probably impossible to teach it all and you should identify at least examples of the important aspects of it. Very general connections to curricula or course materials. They would say things like this project would fit the grade 8 curriculum, or provide a list of very general curriculum outcomes with no specific ideas about how the project would address them. Several identified history curricula as linked to their topic but then did not propose any activities to engage students with historical material.