5 Roles That Make A Good Community Partnership
Community partners play many different roles in Project Based Learning units. As a PBL facilitator and now an instructional coach, I have witnessed firsthand the most effective ways to utilize a community partner in quality and authentic unit.
1. Entry Event
When I taught 1st Grade, we loved using community partners to come in and ask our students for help. An important adult, asking my students for help?! The kiddos were in awe. “You want our help?!” They would ask wide-eyed. Empowering students is one of the most sure-fire ways to launch a successful project. A community partner bringing a challenge or problem to students helps to ignite their enthusiasm, gives them a greater sense of responsibility to someone outside of their classroom, and helps them to feel purpose in their work.
2. Teacher/Presenter
Ever feel like the teacher in Charlie Brown? Wah. Wah. Wah. We had just finished close reading an article titled, “Are Dinosaurs Endangered or Extinct?”. It was our third read and I was feeling pretty confident about the students’ understanding of the vocabulary words extinct and endangered. “I’m looking for two questions about what we just read,” I said to my fifth graders. One of the young men in my class raised his hand. “What is the difference between endangered and extinct?” If face-palming was a thing back then, I would have face-palmed.
Two weeks later, a park ranger came into class with a bald eagle rescue. She talked about our state’s endangered animal list and how worried she was about some of the creatures becoming extinct. In a fifteen-minute presentation, she was able to get across a point that I had spent four whole group lessons trying to convey. The strength of an outside expert teaching students, cannot be overstated. Even if we give them the words to say, somehow hearing it from a fresh person takes away the Charlie Brown effect.
3. Mentor
Often, when we complete a PBL unit our students need outside information. One of the great foundational elements of PBL classroom is establishing an awareness that the teacher is not the source of all knowledge. When using a community partner as a mentor, the students have a role model in the field they are studying who can bridge the gap between the classroom and the “real world.” Utilizing a community partner as a mentor might look like…
- Giving students advice on the PBL unit topic
- Evaluating prototypes and problem-solving attempts
- Giving feedback
- Listening to student presentations to evaluate or give feedback
- Teaching students about specific practices related to their field
The perfect community partner for a mentor role will be available for multiple interactions over the full course of a PBL unit.
4. Collaborator
When my first-grade students tackled a school-wide gardening project, we were thrilled that the local Sierra Club reached out to us. They were on a mission to fill our city with pollinator plants and they wanted our help to do it! A local chapter member and parent came into our classroom and asked students to partner with their club to plant more pollinator plants. They used our students’ PBL unit as the basis for a national grant and worked in tandem with us to choose plants, order them, and plant them. Students not only received valuable mentorship but were treated as equal problem solvers. Without the Sierra Club, our class would not have had the funds to plant. Without our class, the Sierra Club would not have received the grant. We were collaborators working toward a common goal, and that empowered our fifty-four 6-year-olds.
5. Host
Often, a community partner’s location or workplace puts them in the perfect position to host a class. Field trips hosted by a community partner take on more purpose and become a powerful tool for answering Need to Knows from the PBL unit. When equipped with topics that are pertinent to our visit, community partners can be sure to point out answers without being overly obvious. This makes our classroom dialogue richer by providing the necessary background knowledge.
The ideal community partner relationship will include a partner who navigates many of these roles. As we as facilitators build strong community partnerships, it is important to understand the purpose or role our guests will play so that we can properly equip them beforehand.