As a teacher, you know students need a well-rounded environment to grow into strong and independent individuals. While your class lectures may play a part in their intellectual development, community-based activities help their personal growth. Therefore, to cultivate the best combination of attributes in a student, you need to build community engagement into your curriculum.
Community activities give students the necessary exposure, with 3.9% of students performing better in classrooms because they live new experiences. You may notice increased receptiveness, confidence, and critical thinking skills from your students, which in turn boost their academic performance. To further understand how to achieve this milestone with your pupils, here are some ways community activities help:
1. Nurture Leadership Qualities
Leadership qualities equip students with the assertive dependability that they will need to succeed beyond the classroom. It teaches them how to take charge, delegate, and plan to achieve favorable outcomes. Students learn self-reliance once delegated a task that acts as a gesture of trust, such as letting them organize an art exhibition. These motivate students to research, advertise, curate, and present the works of their fellow students in the best way possible, giving them a head start on project management.
As a teacher, you can facilitate students by providing an outline of the tasks depending on the project without interference. However, your students still need you to lead them, so make sure you work on yourself and remain an asset to your pupils. Degrees such as an MSE Educational Leadership online provide you with tools to restructure how you work with your students through effective classroom management. It may help you better understand what your students need and make the necessary arrangements.
Therefore, to arrange better community activities that help students develop specific skillets for the class, make sure you upgrade your qualifications with time.
2. Propagates Awareness and Detail Orientation
A student’s voice matters, and when this voice gets amplified, it helps spread awareness. In 2020 40% of the student body discussed racial justice and received support from the local community. You can help students work alongside the community by encouraging them to get involved with local media companies to deliver more content relevant to current issues.
These may include charged topics such as gun violence and Black Lives Matter. Active involvement makes students more research-oriented and better at thinking by interacting with the local community such as young activists, to get valuable data.
With the right research, students can make proper pitches to TV channels, magazines, and newspapers with factual evidence backing their propositions. But the work doesn’t stop there. Students learn the art of activism and teach it to others. You may find your pupils sharing petition links, emailing authorities on systemic inequality, and even staging protests to highlight social issues further.
3. Makes Learning More Cooperative
Students can investigate collaborative community activities such as tutoring, peer mentorship programs, and even raising funds for those in need through commercial activities. Your guidance is pivotal in instructing students about proper team etiquette and accomplishing team goals.
Students can better deal with conflicts, manage emotions, and work with community members in a team setting without causing disputes. Collaborative learning is also seen favorably by students, with 94% of the student body preferring discussions over standard lectures. It also creates a more wholesome learning environment where students rely on each other to thrive academically.
4. Builds Trust Again
Students from impoverished and marginalized communities hold a deep-seated systemic distrust. Witnessing social prejudices, racist comments, and racial profiling cases pushes them to exercise caution around authority. This severely hinders learning for students, forcing them to drop out, which may become a challenge for schools to combat the rising rate of 4.9% to 6.0%.
The local police department is known for organizing youth outreach programs to establish trust between the public and the police, which can also help students. Teenage students enlisting into these programs get an opportunity to change their perspectives and work with the police in different ways. Students learn anti-bullying ethics in law enforcement and interact with friendly police mentors, which helps rebuild their trust.
With fear no longer in the picture, students have a more fulfilling experience in class and even trust your pedagogy as a teacher. These help students reach academic goals and have faith in the system.
5. Channels Creativity
Community activities such as spending time with the elderly can make students creative. Students can visit any elderly center to meet with the senior folk and look into entertainment opportunities. These can include drawing cards, watching tv shows, or even arranging a play for the aging facility. Creativity is essential for students. It encourages them to think out of the box and develop viable solutions.
For example, your students may encourage you to start using digital platforms to share worksheets, videos, and lesson notes instead of printouts. The more you encourage creativity, the better students think and translate thought into practical action, with 44% of the student body becoming more engaged learners with an affinity for creativity.
6. Teaches Empathy
Volunteering programs such as soup kitchens can help students connect with the community, especially those struggling to make ends meet. Working with people operating the soup kitchens and helping these volunteers work the kitchen instills empathy and kindness in students. Students witness acquiring, delivering, and distributing food which teaches them a valuable lesson about reality.
Empathy helps students perceive others in a kinder light without making cruel passes on their struggle. This essential interpersonal skill helps pupils connect with peers, help struggling students, and actively involve themselves in reshaping the classroom environment.
7. Instills Better Communication Skills
Many cities provide internship programs for students to participate in youth political programs. These help students plan commissions and witness different political policies and opinions on various topics. Students can discuss, challenge, and even debate current policies that may not be inclusive enough and need reforming.
Communication helps students become better learners since they can articulate their needs better. Youth political programs provide students with proper political mentors, which helps them collect data, present an argument and listen to counterpoints. This allows students to talk about relevant issues like parks, public libraries, museums, and even transport.
Active communication is essential in a classroom. It informs you where students struggle and have an easy time following a concept. A student can voice their concerns better without a hint of miscommunication.
Final Thoughts
Students can pick up numerous skills by engaging with the community. You can help students become better learners by providing the opportunity to mingle with people from different backgrounds freely. Community activities nurture leadership, growth, creativity and lead to more engagement between students and these surroundings.
You get to witness your students transform into self-assured, confident individuals ready to tackle any problem with no hesitation. This makes for a better learning experience that will benefit students throughout life.
