Service Learning Reflection

Being a part of my school’s peer tutoring program has been the most gratifying experience of my high school career. As a student, I can relate to those that struggle in a subject and are unable to connect with the material being taught in class. I have worked with students who have lost confidence in themselves because of the difficulty they were having in school. To be given the opportunity to assist students to reach their academic goals is fulfilling. As a peer tutor, I edit essays, share scholarship searches, assist with homework, and provide studying tips and test taking strategies. I enjoy working with my group to develop habits to be more successful.With each higher grade earned, test anxiety relieved, and confident smile of those that I help, I know that the work I am doing is

My agency volunteer work takes place at Busch Middle School of Character, it is through Urban Future which offers after school tutoring, mentoring, transportation, and many other opportunities for the student’s education to be enriched. Busch Middle School typically enrolls around 300-400 6th, 7th, and 8th graders each year. Urban future relays mainly on volunteers to assist with the after school services they provide as well as project mangers that are in charge of running the programs at Busch Middle School. My volunteer work included tutoring 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in the resource lab, during this time the students worked on their reading skills in a program called Achieve3000. Achieve3000 is a program that steadily increases students’ ability to read, comprehend, apply, and communicate information derived from complex text. My role in the resource lab was to make sure every student was understanding the material, and if not, to sit down one on one with a student to help them with their current Achieve3000 lesson. In the resource lab, each student did their very best to engage themselves in the program and expand their level of knowledge.

For my service learning hours, I decided to assistant coach at Four Corners Charter Upper School. When I took on this task, being tremendously excited to work with the girls there and give back to this school. My role consisted of being the assistant coach to my sister Amanda Ramirez, helping her to guide and train the girls to learn the sport of lacrosse. Having experience in coaching high school girl’s lacrosse, I came in with drills and strategies to be the most effective assistant coach. The girls that decided to come out for the team haven’t ever heard of the sport, which became a good thing for coaching, giving us the upper hand for coaching and teaching the sport to the girls.

This past fall I had the chance to volunteer at Oasis Tutoring Center. I thought going in that I was going to show up to get my hours done for my class. I didn’t think about how heavy this experience would embark on my heart. The slogan for Oasis is “Healing Hearts.” This is exactly what happened during my experience at Oasis. Not only did I heal hearts during my tutoring experience, my heart was also healed somehow during it too. This experience will stay with me forever as a teacher and in everyday life. I am so thankful that I could be apart of something so empowering.

1). How do you believe service learning (SL) is utilized as a tool for fostering civic engagement?

To begin, this experience was amazing. I learned so much about children’s literacy, and I even saw growth in the 4 weeks I worked with my student, which also made this experience rewarding. I believe this tutoring experience helped me as a future teacher, but also helped the student I was tutoring. At the beginning of the program the student struggles greatly with fluency, all the aspects of it. The student stumbled over words, read words that were not there, had trouble “thinking out” words, and read with no prosody. The first week was spent getting to know the child and what troubles the child faced when reading. Once the second week came around we worked on a phonics review of beginning and ending blends. The student seemed to know the beginning blends but struggled with the ending blends so we spent

For my Community Service Learning placement, I am volunteering for PAAL, which is a program for children and youth with physical and intellectual impairments. Their vision is to offer individuals who otherwise may not get the chance, an opportunity to participate in a wide variety of physical activities.

The facility I chose to volunteer at to complete my service learning was the CMPD Animal Care and Control. The CMPD Animal Care and Control was a good place to do my service learning because it related to my topic perfectly. The CMPD Animal Care and Control because they take a variety of breeds. They are also very informative about breed discrimination. The organization is part of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, but they work with animals. The organization provides safety to citizen and animals in the community. They promote proper pet ownership and loving homes for adoptable pets. Another goal is to decrease the overpopulation with spay and neuter clinics.

At a young age, school work is sometimes not one of the main things on a child’s agenda. They can easily get distracted and would rather play games on the electronics or gossip with friends and find ways of getting around their school work. I’ve found that being an ARAC tutor is more than just a job. It allows for college students to make a difference on an individual level that can later on impact a whole community. Working in the Bibb County schools has provided me with insight into a community that is less fortunate than where I grew up. It has made me realize that I am giving these students more than just help with their education. I am providing them with an image of a person that provides a positive contribution to

I really enjoyed my service learning site because I got to work with kids from different backgrounds and help them with pronunciation and reading. I most significant accomplishment for me was be able to help kids who are struggling with English as a second language. I was pleased to see one of the students that I worked with actually came out of his shell and talked to other kids in the class. When I worked with him, he did not clearly pronounce the words, and his responds to me question were just nodding his head or performing some kind of gestures. For me last few weeks there, I was happy to see him being comfortable to speak out and interacting with other students. The most important thing I learned from my experience is that being patience

Upon starting my undergraduate career at Saint Louis University, I immediately began serving as a volunteer tutor at Sherman Elementary School in St. Louis. I had been involved in community service for as long as I could remember, but I had never felt that I was not accomplishing the task that I set out to do. Unfortunately, this was not the case for me at Sherman Elementary. While I was tasked with bringing lagging students back up to the pace of the class, I most certainly failed at achieving this goal. It seemed that I was working, week after week, with the same students on the same problems. In hindsight, I think that my failure to build a strong rapport with my students was the primary problem. Since my background rests in a rural town

Finding an organization for service learning is not hard. There are more than a handful in the Wichita area, the hard part is deciding which one to get involved with. I decided to do my service learning in my hometown of Belle Plaine at the annual Tulip Time Festival.

This paper will detail Service Learning through a student’s eyes. It should serve as a reflection of her short time at the Early Childhood Learning Center on Fayetteville State University’s campus. Though the hours spent volunteering were part of requirements for an Introductions to Human Services course, they still made a huge impact on the author. These hours have changed the author’s perspective on working with children, serving as a confirmation on her future. Assuring her that whatever career path they choose should revolve heavily around children.

On the first few days of second semester, I began to get trained in order to Peer Tutor. At first, I felt overwhelmed. I thought my personality may scare away tutees, possibly giving the program itself a mediocre name. I learned about the characteristics necessary in order to become a successful Peer Tutor, in addition to the process of escorting tutees to the Peer Tutoring classroom and communicating with teachers. After learning the process, my confidence kicked in. I began to observe teachers in order to learn how to appeal to different types of learners.

According to Kathleen Flecky and Lynn Gitlow, service-learning is defined as, “learning that occurs in experiences, reflection, and civic engagement” (Flecky & Gitlow, 2011). In recent years more universities are implementing service learning into their curriculum. A key concept of service learning is civic responsibility. Civic responsibility can simply be defined as your responsibilities as a citizen. As will be shown later in this paper, service learning can have many benefits not only to a student, but also to the community members