How to create exhibits that honor and inspire service at your school
- Audience: K-12 educators, student leaders and community mentors
- Primary Focus: Student-led service learning, community engagement, public exhibitions of service and community centered demonstration of learning
- Language: Bilingual (English/Spanish)
- Author: Students and staff in the John Lewis Leadership Program at John Lewis High School (Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia)
The toolkit maps the entire lifecycle of a student-led service project to creating a museum of service into four phases:
- Getting ready (investigate & clarify):
Focused on building peer relationships, connecting to core values, and defining the project’s “why”.
- Share It (reflect, demonstrate & curate):
Guides the reflective selection of project artifacts and stories to construct a public exhibition of learning.
- Plan it (assess & plan):
Instructs teams on identifying community strengths and needs via community inventories (surveys, interviews, walks, research) and mapping out an actionable project plan.
- Do it (track & reflect):
Tools for identifying, prioritizing, and tracking tasks alongside self-assessments and ongoing journal templates.
“An exhibition’s power is not in its formality or scale: it is in the connections that spark when we trust our students to engage in real-world learning.” — Deborah Sran, Program Manager
Key features
- Bilingual framework: Employs parallel Spanish/English text, graphic organizers, and sentence starters to maximize instructional equity and access.
- Integrated mentor checklists: Every section concludes with a structured “Mentor Conversation Checklist” to prompt guided reflection between students and community mentors.
- Curation assets: Includes explicit photo templates, quote templates, reflection tools, and print-ready exhibition headings (
WHAT WE DID,OUR IMPACT,WHAT WE LEARNED,WHAT'S NEXT) to streamline display construction. - Process-driven curation: Designed under the principle that planning scraps, photos, and early drafts serve as meaningful exhibit artifacts that document leadership growth.
“What I try to tell young people is that if you come together with a mission, and it’s grounded with love and a sense of community, you can make the impossible possible.” — Congressman John R. Lewis