Faculty Brief
The publication designed for faculty exploring Service-Learning partnerships, Project Launchers, and experiential learning opportunities.
Read the Faculty Brief →For Teaching & Learning Leaders
A community partner your faculty can actually use
For Teaching & Learning Centers, Faculty Development Offices, Community Engagement Leaders, Department Chairs, Deans, and Academic Leadership.
Service-learning works when there's a real organization on the other end.
GradPlanHQ serves as a community partner for faculty seeking meaningful, high-impact experiences for students.
We're building a repeatable model that helps students gain experience, proof, relationships, and visibility through real projects.
Students do the work.
Faculty guide the learning.
GradPlanHQ provides the partnership structure.
Planning Happens Before Registration
Service-learning and community-engaged courses are often planned months before students enroll. If you're identifying faculty for the next term, now is the time to begin the conversation.
Most partnerships begin with a short planning session before the course is finalized.
Schedule a Planning Conversation →Resources To Share
If a faculty member sent you here, they probably need something to share with a colleague, chair, dean, teaching center, or community engagement office.
Choose the resource that best fits the audience.
Higher Education Brief
A higher-level overview focused on institutional outcomes, implementation, community partnerships, and student success.
Read the Higher Education Brief →Sample Term-End Summary
See the format used to document participation, artifacts, skills practiced, and project outcomes.
View Sample Report →Why this fits a Teaching & Learning portfolio
You already promote high-impact practices. The hard part is delivery: finding a reliable community partner, making sure the course has something to show for it, and documenting it for reporting. We handle all three.
The challenge isn't convincing faculty that high-impact practices matter.
The challenge is helping more faculty implement them consistently and sustainably.
53.1%
of recent graduates participated in an internship
Center for Engaged Learning
32.5%
participated in service-learning or community-engaged coursework
Center for Engaged Learning
AAC&U
lists service-learning and internships among its high-impact practices, tied to retention, critical thinking, and personal and social responsibility
AAC&U Essential Learning Outcomes
What's included every term
- A planning session with you before the term starts, to set the goal and the deliverable.
- Three live video sessions with your class, scheduled around your course calendar.
- Project framing support: goal, strategy, and an inventory of the assets students already have.
- A project brief template every student fills in, plus a proof artifact they keep.
- A term-end summary for you: participation, artifacts produced, and skills practiced — formatted for HIP and NSSE reporting.
- An optional post-course session for students who want to keep their project going.
How the term runs
It starts with the professor, not the students. The planning session sets the goal and strategy so the class sessions have something real to push on.
01
Planning session with you
Before we meet students, we sit down with you: the community need, your learning outcomes, the deliverable, and how you'll grade it. Nothing gets scheduled until that's settled.
02
Kickoff
We meet the class, frame the community need, and walk students through goal, strategy, and an inventory of what they've already got to work with.
03
Midpoint
Students bring the work in progress. We troubleshoot scope, coordination, and the parts that always go sideways in week three.
04
Showcase
Students present results and leave with a proof artifact they can put on a resume, an application, or LinkedIn.
Now Accepting · Pilot
Founding Course Cohort
We're intentionally piloting the Service-Learning Partner model with up to three new courses each semester.
The goal is to:
- Learn from each partnership
- Improve reporting
- Document student outcomes
- Refine implementation
- Build a repeatable model
Returning courses retain their partnership slot.
This is an intentional pilot cohort, not simply a capacity limitation.
PeerTakes
A proven project pattern
PeerTakes was developed through seven semesters of volunteer community-partner participation in a leadership Service-Learning course: upperclassmen designing service projects for the students coming up behind them. Students practiced the leadership principles they were reading about, and the younger students got something real.
The reason it works is social credibility. Your students are uniquely qualified to serve the ones behind them — they sat in that classroom recently, they made the course choices, and they know which advice was useless. A 20-year-old saying it out loud lands in a way no administrator's slide deck ever will.
- Critical thinking
- Coordination
- Persuasion
- Follow-through
- Teamwork
- Ethical decision-making
Start With One Course
Most partnerships begin with a single faculty member, a single course, and a short planning conversation.
If you're exploring possibilities for next semester, let's start there.