Service Learning: Turn Your Program Values Into Measurable Goals

Hello, everyone! Last week, we began our new series based on a recent service-learning webinar presented by two of our excellent consultants, Drs. Tina Butler and Jennifer Eames. They showed us how service learning can help connect your institutional mission, program mission, curriculum, and the kind of providers you hope to graduate.

This week, we're taking the next step. If service is something your program values, how do you turn that value into a meaningful and measurable part of PA education?

Now, I'm handing you back to Drs. Butler and Eames.

How Do You Measure a Good Human?

Last week, we asked a deliberately informal question: How do you grow good humans? Now comes the harder question: How do you measure that?

Look at some of the language that commonly appears in program missions and goals. You may want to develop lifelong learners. Competent graduates. Empathetic providers. Professionals committed to serving the greater good. Those are worthwhile aspirations. They're also difficult to measure.

“Empathetic provider” isn't a benchmark. “Serving the greater good” isn't evidence of achievement.

If service is genuinely important to your program, consider attaching something measurable to it. In our program, for example, we've established a minimum of 50 service hours before graduation. Your appropriate benchmark might be 20 hours, 40 hours, or something entirely different. The number isn't the important part. It needs to be achievable and meaningful for your particular program.

Then track it. Our students submit service logs at the end of the didactic year, again at the end of the clinical year, and at graduation. That allows us to determine whether students are meeting the benchmark and gives us evidence that the goal is being achieved. In fact, we've found that most students greatly exceed our minimum expectation.

Now an abstract value has become something the program can actually demonstrate.

Create a Through-Line

Ideally, service shouldn't suddenly appear halfway through a student's PA education. If it's an important part of your program's identity, create a through-line.

In our program, that begins during admissions. We look at applicants' previous volunteer and service experience, and we make it clear that service is something we value. Once students enter the program, they know we expect them to keep giving back.

We make that expectation clear on our website and in our handbook. That's important from a practical standpoint. If you're asking students to make a genuine commitment to service during an already demanding PA education, they should know what they're signing up for from day one.

It also illustrates an important accreditation principle: what you say you do, what you actually do, and what your students understand you do should tell the same story.

Read Every Word of the Standard

Here's a good example of why that matters: for programs incorporating international service experiences, ARC-PA Standard A3.09b addresses travel health policies. But having a travel health policy alone doesn't satisfy everything in the Standard.

Look closely, and you'll find four obligations.

The program must:

1. Publish the policy.

2. Make it readily available to current and prospective students.

3. Base it on current CDC recommendations for health professionals and applicable state or country mandates.

4. Apply it consistently.

That's quite a bit of responsibility packed into one sentence.

If your policy exists in a handbook nobody can easily locate, you've addressed only part of the requirement. If it's published but hasn't been kept current with CDC guidance, there's another problem. And if the written policy says one thing but exceptions are routinely made, you may have a consistency problem.

So don't just ask, “Do we have a policy?” Ask: Where is it published? Can students and applicants find it? Is it current? And can we demonstrate that we're applying it consistently?

Make It Easy to Find

“Published” and “readily available” aren't necessarily the same thing.

We generally recommend putting information where students and prospective students can actually find it. For a travel health policy, that may mean publishing it clearly on the program website rather than burying it inside a PDF or on a vaguely labeled checklist page.

Label things plainly. If someone is looking for your international travel health policy, don't make that person play detective.

The same common-sense principle can apply to your service expectations. If service is an admissions preference, a graduation requirement, a program goal, or another formal expectation, be clear about what it is and where students can find the information. Clarity helps applicants make informed choices and helps students understand their responsibilities.

Build the Evidence as You Go

Finally, document how you arrived at your decisions. If faculty discussed establishing a service benchmark, keep the meeting minutes. If you held a brainstorming session about an international experience, document it. If your program decided why one requirement made sense instead of another, preserve the evidence of that process. Don't wait until you're preparing for a review and try to reconstruct how a decision was made months or years earlier.

Service learning may begin with a desire to give back. But once you make it part of your program's goals, policies, or curriculum, the same principles of thoughtful program design apply: decide what you want to accomplish, make your expectations clear, measure what you've said matters, and document the process along the way.

See you next time…

Thanks again to Drs. Butler and Eames! Next week, they'll take us beyond policies and benchmarks and show us what it looks like when service becomes part of a program's culture, from faculty and community partnerships to students who take ownership of the work themselves.

There may even be puppies involved, so I know you’ll want to join us.