August 26, 2025. The 74 - America's Education News Source - published an opinion piece by Samaritan Scout co-founder, Dvora Inwood. She shares her vision for an updated approach to K-12 student volunteering, grounded in her decades expertise in curriculum construction and her recent experiences with volunteering and service possibilities:

Let’s Bring Project-Based Learning and Community Service Into the 21st Century

Inwood: It’s time to stop wasting students’ time with slide-deck projects and checkbox community service and let students engage in the real world.

Project-based Learning isn’t new. It’s more than a century old, rooted in John Dewey’s belief that children learn best by doing. That idea has stood the test of time. Research continues to confirm that students retain more when they engage with content actively, with their minds, hands, and hearts.

Despite its promise, traditional PBL often collapses into superficial showcases: glorified slide decks and videos passed off as deep learning. Kids have been making presentations since kindergarten; by high school, it’s more ritual than rigor. It’s an astonishingly inefficient use of time, talent, and opportunity.

I know this because I’ve lived it. I helped design and launch several of Los Angeles’ most successful project-based charter schools, including Larchmont Charter and Valley Charter,  between 2004 and 2014. I’ve taught mathematics, earned a master’s in curriculum construction from Stanford University and worked alongside brilliant educators committed to making learning meaningful. And I believe it’s time to evolve PBL — not discard it, but bring it fully into the world our students actually live in.

That world is complex, unpredictable and increasingly polarized. It requires collaboration, communication, creativity and adaptability. So our learning models must meet that challenge. We can do this by fusing the best of PBL with the best of community service —and then modernizing both.

Too often, “community service” in schools becomes a checkbox. Students log hours doing well-intentioned but disconnected tasks. They pack food boxes or clean park trails. These efforts are not without value, but they’re rarely linked to any larger purpose, and they rarely push students to think, lead, or grow.

What if, instead of logging hours, students designed and implemented “community impact projects?”

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