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TitleFacilitating Goal Setting for Language-Focused Service Learning Projects
SourceCASLS Activity of the Week
Body

By Logan Matz, CASLS Fellow

As language educators, we often have a crucial role in bridging the gap between the various communities our students, friends, and neighbors inhabit. This activity is designed to help teachers and learners work together to develop prudent goals that help and enable your students and their language learning via service learning (SL).

Students will be able to:

  • Develop overall goals and enable sub-goals along a realistic timeline
  • Narrow the scope of goals to focus on student learning and local community impact
  • Evaluate peer goals for appropriateness relating to content, time, and alignment with overall project goals

Modes: Any, depending on the nature of the SL project

Materials needed: SL Goal Setting Handout

Procedure:

  1. An essential step in a successful service learning project is the goal-setting phase. Here, divide your learners in groups and let them choose their own topics. Ideally, these will be topics that they feel passionate about.
  2. Once your learners have selected a topic, have them brainstorm 3-5 overall goals to achieve with the project. Learners will use the first part of the SL Goal Setting Handout for this task.
  3. Next, have your learners move on to the second part of the Handout. For each of their main goals, learners will ask themselves, “What do I need to achieve this?”

Example: Students choose to focus on a community health project related to breastfeeding in the local Hispanic community. If a main goal is “to be able to communicate effectively about breastfeeding,” learners might include “learn specialized vocab needed to talk about breastfeeding,” “learn cultural norms surrounding breastfeeding in Hispanic communities,” or “find and assess currently available community health resources.” While there is no requirement regarding how many of these sub-goals that learners define, work to help them make sure that they have broken down their main goals into manageable chunks.

  1. Next, help learners make sure that their goals have a narrow enough focus to be effective at addressing the stated problem, as well as enhance their language learning. This can be done in a class discussion on appropriate scope for goals (for example, reminding learners that it’s not possible to solve every single problem at once). Alternatively, this step can be incorporated in Step 5.
  2. Finally, pair up project groups (depending on size) and give each group a chance to share their goals and sub-goals with the paired group. The second group can then give advice about whether the goals of the first group align with the topic and content, whether they’ve set up a reasonable time frame, and whether their sub-goals align and make sense within their larger goals.

Notes:

  • A possible adaptation would be to let learners work individually instead of in groups.
  • Another way to have learners evaluate the feasibility of their goals (Step 4) is to make sure that they are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely) goals.
Publishdate2018-03-26 02:15:01