8
Communication with the community organization was expected to be handled by myself, the TA,
and the student leaders. I made the initial contacts and also met with the organization again as needed.
The teams were assigned a timeline to follow, which included a meeting between the student leader, the
TA, and the community organization; for some of the groups, I also attended these meetings. From that
point on, the student leaders were able to contact the community organization as they worked on their
project. The TA was also active in discussing the progress of the project with the organizations. This set-
up worked well, except when community organizations were unresponsive to student leaders (more on
this problem in the next section).
To help ensure that students did their fair share of the team project, I used three procedures. First,
I held a training session in which I spent considerable time discussing how to deal with students who
were not working on the project. Second, student leaders were asked throughout the course how the
project was going and how well the students were participating. We provided student leaders with advice
on how to encourage participation. Finally, we structured the grading of the project so that students had
an incentive to participate. Student grades were based on the overall project; this was the average grade
for the team. Students graded the performance of all of the other students in their team. Students could
get a higher grade if their teammates gave them high evaluations; a lower grade would be given to
underperforming students. This format gave each student (or at least those who cared about their grade in
the course) an incentive to do his or her part in the project.
Students also had individual volunteer requirements. As shown in Figure 2, the lines of
communication were different from those used for the team projects. Each student was required to
volunteer for fifteen hours with their team’s community organization or an organization of their choice
(depending on the nature of the team project). Students with questions or concerns were told to work
with the TA. It was the student’s responsibility to contact the appropriate community organization and
arrange a time to volunteer. Because all of the community organizations were already approved by the
SIUC’s Office of Student Development as an appropriate for the “Saluki Volunteer Corp” (a university
wide program), we knew that the organizations had been trained to work with students on service learning
Convention