Connect Service to Life

Martha McCormick on July 19, 2009

Processing the experience is a core component of an effective service learning experience. You can process in a group or have group members create journals or portfolios. The questions here can be used for any of those methods; choose the ones that will help your group members internalize their service learning experience. This first group of questions will help reflect on what happened?

  • Look back on today. What struck you most strongly?
  • What happened?
  • What images stand out in your mind? What sights, sounds and smells?
  • What experiences and conversations do you especially remember?
  • What is it about these images that make you remember them?
  • Who did you meet and work with during the day?
  • Who did you relate to most easily? Who did you find it hardest to talk to?
  • Why?
  • What did you learn about the people you met? How are they like you?
  • How are they different?
  • What needs did your service try to meet? Did it succeed? Why or why not?
  • What information or skills did you learn today?
  • How did you apply what you knew before to this project?

What does it mean?

  • What was happening in your heart? What did you feel? Were you upset?
  • Were you surprised? Confused? Content? What touched you most deeply?
  • Why?
  • What did you find frustrating? What did you find most hopeful?
  • What would it be like to trade places with the people you worked with?
  • What did you learn about yourself?
  • What do you like about what you learned? What would you like to change?
  • How did the experience change or challenge your convictions and beliefs?

Now what?

  • How were justice and injustice present in the situations you faced today?
  • Did you learn anything new about what causes suffering?
  • What did you learn about how you can make things better?
  • How are you part of the problem? How are you part of the solution?
  • What did you learn today that will help you in your future service work?
  • What needs to change in the world to make things better?
  • What needs to change in you?
  • What hopes and expectations do you have for those you served? For yourself?
  • How did the service experience affect how you would like to live?
  • How did it affect what type of job or career you might choose?

Adapted from An Asset Builder’s Guide to Service Learning, A Search Institute Publication, 2000, page 96

Fishbowl Discussion

Martha McCormick on July 17, 2009

A fishbowl discussion allows everyone in a large group to participate in a series of small group discussions. In a group larger than four or five it’s hard for everyone to have a chance to speak.

This method allows up to five people to discuss a topic for a set amount of time, with the rest of the group taking turns as the audience. It’s a non-threatening way to develop speaking and listening skills. It can help people get over the fear of speaking in front of a group because it’s more like a conversation than speaking before an audience.

Arrange four or five chairs in an inner circle. This is the fishbowl. Arrange the rest of the chairs in concentric circles around the fishbowl. Select enough participants or ask for volunteers to fill the fishbowl, while the rest of the group sit on the chairs outside the fishbowl.

Now introduce the topic for discussion and the participants in the fishbowl start discussing the topic. The audience outside the fishbowl listens.

You can choose between an open fishbowl and a closed fishbowl, two different methods to make sure everyone gets a chance to join in the conversation.

In an open fishbowl, leave one chair empty and explain that any member of the audience can, at any time, occupy the empty chair and join the fishbowl. When this happens, one member of the fishbowl must voluntarily leave the fishbowl so there is always one free chair.

The discussion continues with participants frequently entering and leaving the fishbowl. This method, if your audience members are interested and assertive, will allow most audience members to spend time in the fishbowl and participate in the discussion.

When time runs out, close the fishbowl and summarize the discussion.

In a closed fishbowl, all chairs are filled. The initial participants speak for a specified amount of time, maybe five minutes. When time runs out, they leave the fishbowl and a new group from the audience enters the fishbowl.

This continues until most audience members have spent some time in the fishbowl. Once the final group has concluded, close the fishbowl and summarize the discussion.

In a timed discussion, let the people in the fish bowl discuss the topic for a certain period of time – say, 15 minutes. Then stop the discussion and invite the people who aren’t in the inner circle to give feedback on what they heard in the fishbowl.

To use the fishbowl exchange, divide the group into two smaller groups; have each of these groups meet separately and come up with three or four open-ended questions for the other group. Have them write their questions down; reconvene and exchange questions.
Form two circles, one small group inside the other, both facing inward. Have the fishbowl (the inside group) read a question and discuss it. The outside circle cannot speak, only listen.

Go through all the questions, making sure everyone in the fishbowl gets to speak. Now switch circles and go through the process again.