Principles of Best Practices

Intention
What specific learning and knowledge do I intend to result from this situation?
This question should guide subsequent choices while not limiting the learning outcomes of individual learners.

Authenticity
An authentic experience allows the learner to recognize that learning is relevant and that her/his own knowledge gives her/his power to affect her/his world. TPL requires authenticity as students test previously learned facts and theories, revising assumptions, and deriving new and first hand knowledge.

Planning
Planning teaches teamwork, communication and problem-solving that transcend content-based or curricular goals. Community partners must be involved in planning in order to develop realistic and useful abjectives and reciprocal goals. Planning should include projected outcomes, expectations, responsibilities, timelines, protocols and procedures.

Clarity
Clarity only happens with regular and committed communications. Expectations and responsibilities of the teacher, the learner, and community partner must be clear. The learner should be actively involved in setting and clearly articulating her/his own goals for learning, personal development, strategies, and outcomes. An orientation is a crucial element of the ongoing training and mentoring required for clarity and useful performance.

Monotoring and Assessment
These should be ongoing processes. Criteria should be articulated during the planning process and should include specific outcome measures chosen by the student, faculty, and community partner. A feedback system should be inplace to assist in continous improvement.

Reflection
This process of "looking back over" learning, activities, analyses, and relationships is central to excellent experiential learning. It should be done throughout the semester and related to goals and outcomes expected. Learners should be offered a variety of structured and unstructured activities that support reflection to insure that intended and more serendipitous goals are addressed. Journals, daily logs, simulations, small group discussions, and focused conversations are common tools of reflection.

Evaluation
One reflective tool useful for evaluation is a portfolio. There are many ways of using a Portfolio as a representation of your work and the process of learning. One description of a portfolio is:
" A multidimensional, documented collection of a student's work put together in an organized way and including reflective, integrative, and synthetic materials as elarning develops over the time of the course."
Throughout the semester as part of an ongoing portfolio work, students continued to respond to the issues and learning presented in and beyond the class , keeping sharp focus on the central topics and goals of the class. The portfolio format enables them to track their process of learning in response to the shifting, expanding, and changing understand resulting from theory inegrating with practice. Learners can return to formerentries and revisit their thinking, analyses, and conclusions. Add an additional entry describing any shifts, clarifications, and/or growing understanding or confusions related to the issues in an entry is useful .
Evaluation should include questions such as, were the predicted learning outcomes the actual ones achieved? Evaluations shoulds result not only in yes or no answers, but should also analyze "why"? It should include a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, mixing aggregate data gathered in statiscally sound ways with narrative and descriptive data gathered through interviews, focus groups, and observation.

Acknowledgement
Knowledge and learning are good causes for celebration, and capstone event or documentation is important foro closure. Acknowledgement should not, however, be done only at the end of the learning process. It comes in constructive and critical feedback; it comes in shared reflection, learning what matters.