Excellent schools strive to develop a comprehensive and integrative improvement process for students and their families that integrate best practices of positive school culture, climate, and social and emotional learning; character development skills, enhanced academic achievement strategies, and positive parent engagement. Character.org's…

"Service-learning" is a multilayered term with a complex historical evolution. In the last two decades, service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) have flourished in higher education as staff, faculty, and students have realized it can be a high-impact teaching and learning practice to promote student learning and development.…

Common Ground High School in New Haven, Connecticut, has made student voice and leadership not only a philosophy, but a universal principle. The single-site charter school sits on 20 acres of land and houses an urban farm that produces more than 10,000 pounds of local food each year. Students are encouraged to become local changemakers by serving…

This chapter explores the use of powerful pedagogies such as service-learning, cultural immersion, and community-based research to enhance leadership development. Four key principles are presented that describe how leadership educators can facilitate community-based learning in a way that creates an optimal learning environment for students, while…

Twenty-first century educators of young children need skills and dispositions for building partnerships with the families of all their students. Educators worldwide frequently teach children from families whose backgrounds, including socioeconomic status and home language, are different from their own. This article introduces 12 principles for…

Management faculties often use cases, simulations, and research projects to achieve learning objectives in the Principles of Management class. This class typically aims to introduce students to the topics of "planning, organizing, coordinating, staffing, directing, budgeting, controlling, and evaluating functions of management; leadership…

As many have noted, we are seeing the continuing marginalization of Social Foundations of Education (SFE) courses and programs to the point at which some are disappearing completely. SFE can play a vital role in helping universities establish relationships with their local communities that are equitable and based upon the voices and needs of the…

Greater interest from students, universities, and communities has increased pressure on faculty to design and implement service-learning courses. Often with no prior experience and limited institutional and programmatic guidance, faculty must make their way through a growing body of literature on service-learning. This article presents a novice…

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a synchronistic set of events and relationships generated a new kind of experiential learning in communities across Mississippi. Educators based at the University of Mississippi, community-based educators, social justice advocates, and funders collaborated to provide the resources and opportunities for…

Program evaluation is recognized as an essential skill set for practitioners in service-related fields, such as education, nonprofit management, social work, and public health. Recently, the need for a public workforce trained in evaluation has increased and is driven primarily by our nation's emphasis on accountability during a time when…

Urban life comes with diverse social, environmental, health care, and education problems. However, for many of the people seeking better economic, social, and education opportunities, the big city still holds a special allure. Jazz singer Frank Sinatra sings in "New York, New York" that he wants to "wake up in a city that never…

An undergraduate social work program developed a service-learning experience in partnership with a local United Way organization to complete a community needs assessment project. The experience integrated the curricula of a social work research methods course and a generalist-macro practice course with the principles and actions of experiential…

As a veteran teacher, Horace Smith fought the creeping disillusionment and cynicism many in the education field experience at times. He did so by asking questions and having the courage and gumption to start a conversation with colleagues about their school. From those early conversations with Horace, new ones emerged. Some were among those who…

Background: In recent years, more and more secondary schools in Hong Kong begin to employ service learning in designing student learning activities. A vast majority of these attempts is developed based on the philanthropic ideas of altruism, love and care; it involves serving elderly people living in the elderly homes far away from the school…

The environmental threats humanity faces have led businesses to increasingly commit to improve their environmental performance and to increasing attempts to address environmental issues in management education. This article presents a matrix of (a) principles that can underlie and (b) attributes that can be generated by environmentally focused…