2. Call or visit a local Service-Learning center. Then, based on your own experience and the help of staff, you can choose the best opportunities for presentation to your students.

     3. With service sites or activities in mind, consider your goals and motives in using the application. What are you trying to accomplish for your students, yourself, and the community? Review your course objectives to determine those that can be linked to service. Before going further, list two or three specific and measurable service and learning goals and objectives for your initiative. Be clear at this point of your desired destination. If we don't know where we're going, we're likely to wind up someplace else.

     4. Based upon your motives, goals, and objectives choose a course service option. Decide how you will incorporate community service into your course. Course service options can range from a one-time special project (Habitat for Humanity, Special Olympics) to a forty + hour volunteer commitment to an agency. You can offer the option as extra-credit, an alternative to a library research paper or other required project, or a requirement for course completion. For those who choose to make service-learning a course requirement, promotion or advertisement of your course and its service component will attract students who are motivated to learn in this way.

     5. Once you have chosen how service will be incorporated, review and alter your course description and syllabus to reflect the change. To be successfully integrated, the service experience must be more than just an add-on to an already full syllabus. Identify some readings that might tie the service to specific objectives. Allocate some class time for discussion of the experience even if all students do not participate. By consciously committing to integrating service, up-front and in writing, you are on your way to a successful implementation.

     6. On the first day of class, explain and promote the ideas behind including service-learning in your class. Explain the two-fold benefits to the student and the community. Make your commitment very clear and encourage them to take advantage of the opportunity for both the personal and academic growth that service affords. Make the decision to volunteer easy and provide specifics on the locations, hours, and length of commitment of each service option. Have student handbooks and handouts available to describe service-learning and opportunities available. For those offering more extensive term-long commitments, be sure to get your students placed in service early.

     7. Work with students to develop specific service and learning objectives for their volunteer experiences. Students must be guided in their development of these objectives so that they are clearly linked with the academic objectives of your course. Most students are not skilled in developing objectives and are not familiar with your specific course learning objectives or how to link them to a seemingly non-academic experience. Typically students will develop more affective objectives (improve self-esteem, feel better about the community) or general non-course related objectives (improve the community, learn about hospice care, learn how to build a house). To improve fulfillment of your courses' academic goals, you must help them link the service to specific course objectives. In a business course, students working with Habitat for Humanity might learn about managerial communication or "just-in-time" supply strategies. For a psychology course, the objective might be understanding the dynamics of group formation or gender roles and functioning in a project.

     In come cases you may wish to delay this step until after students have been oriented to their volunteer placements so that they have some idea of what kinds of service they will be doing. In other cases, where you are familiar with the placement, you can have them do this prior to the service. Some faculty prescribe the learning and service objectives for the entire class. Establishing these student learning objectives up-front is a critical step in assuring the effectiveness of the service-learning in enriching student learning of course material. This step requires creativity and focus, but success here will lead to better learning.

     8. Teach students how to harvest the service experience for knowledge. Experiential learning requires that we learn where we are. We can learn a variety of things in many different situations depending on the questions we are asking. Many of our students are not skilled in this practice. With their learning objectives in mind, students must be taught to focus on these objectives and related questions as they participate in the service setting (participant observation). While the math student is working on a Habitiat for Humanity project, she thinks about the algebra or geometry used in developing the architechtural plans. The business student may listen to workers' communication patterns and draw conclusions about the managerial structure as he helps patients into the pool at the rehabilitation center. The human relations student observes families interacting as she delivers mail to the hospice patients. Because many students lack experience and confidence in learning in nontraditional, non-classroom environments, we must teach them these skills.

     9. Link the service experience to your academic course content through deliberate and guided reflection. The practice of reflection is what combines the learning to the service. We cannot assume that learning will automatically result from experience. If it did, we'd all be a lot wiser. Like us, our students may not learn from their experience. They may even learn the wrong thing or reinforce existing prejudices. Reflection helps prevent this from occurring.

     10. Evaluate your service-learning outcomes as you would any other academic product. Remember, students are being graded on the academic product, not their hours of service. Many of us feel uncertain when it comes to evaluating or assessing the outcomes of experiences we did not completely structure or present. By designing flexible measures, however, you can use the same standard used in evaluating any other written or oral presentation: Did the student master the course material? This is the only way to assure academic integrity of the strategy.

     You may also wish to utilize formative and summative research techniques to measure your success in achieving your objectives. Formative assessment can be achieved through reading students journals with an eye toward answering your initial questions (Are they learning algebra? Is their writing more alive? Is the service setting appropriate?) Periodic quick surveys can provide specific answers to issues such as student satisfaction with the process, utility of experimental techniques, etc. Summative techniques might be employed to compare learning outcomes for service-learning sections with those from traditionally taught sections. For quantitative research, you could collect data on the number and type of people served by your students and the number of hours provided. Collecting stories and gleaning information related to your objectives is a possible qualitative approach. The opportunities for research in the area of service-learning abound, and any contribution to this body of knowledge will help us improve and expand the application of the strategy