The Compassionate Classroom: Community Outreach in Education

When students are engaged with what they’re learning, they learn more effectively. According to experts, one way to create that kind of engagement in the classroom is for educators to get to know their students: their preferences, their challenges, and their backgrounds. Grounding lessons in personal experiences helps to connect students to material, which, in turn, encourages successful learning. Similarly, when students are also invested in their communities, they start to become knowledgeable agents for positive social change. So how can educators help their students actively engage not just in the classroom, but also in their larger communities? Community outreach in schools, or service learning, combines course content and learning pedagogies with real-world service in order to help students “learn in real world contexts and develop skills of community engagement, while affording community partners opportunities to address significant needs.”

If classroom engagement results from lessons relating to students’ personal experiences, then helping students connect to their communities starts when they better understand their own communities. Students need to understand the diversity of experiences within their own lives as well as within the lives of their peers.

To aid these efforts, we’ve got some ideas about incorporating community outreach into your school’s mission and educational planning.

• Understand your communities. Kick off your school outreach program by reaching out to both students’ families and different neighborhood organizations. Knowing what matters to parents and local groups can give educators and administrators great context when deciding to focus on service-learning projects.
• Explore service-learning opportunities. Organizations such as the National Youth Leadership Council offer programs to train students as leaders in their communities and provide professional-learning resources that help educators incorporate service learning into their teaching.
• Bring community into the classroom. Invite local professionals to speak at school and host workshops where they can and work actively with students, discussing local problems and potential solutions. Alternately, students can gain valuable skills by interviewing community leaders and presenting on their findings.
• Lead with experience. Encourage educators to share their own experiences in the community. “Encouraging student action through my own actions is a powerful and subtle way to get students thinking about how they want to be involved,” said Tamera Musiowsky-Borneman, a teacher at the ISS International School Singapore, “and inspires them to go home and ask their caregivers to attend future [community] events.”
• Create community-based projects. Encourage students to explore their own communities in order to unpack preconceptions and misconceptions others might have. In some cases, that might mean letting students become the teachers so they can share their own experiences with classmates who might have different social, economic, or ethnic backgrounds.
• Share community engagement opportunities. Schools can regularly post or announce service opportunities and hold recognition ceremonies for hours of service completed.

For more information about how to bring community outreach into the classroom, check out the following resources:

1. 5 Steps for Launching Your Community Outreach and Engagement Program
2. 95 Ways to Engage Members through Family & Community Outreach