How to Create a Values-Driven Classroom

Each year, one of the most important things I do in my classroom is devote a lesson to having students reflect on their top values, share and discuss them with each other, then turn them in so I can write them down.

While I typically do this during the first week, it works well at any point and can shake things up after the first quarter or trimester too, offering a tool and lens for your classroom community going forward.

What It Looks Like In My Classroom

There are many ways to do this exercise, but these are the basic steps I follow:

1. Providing students with several lists of core values, arranged alphabetically, and asking them to choose a small number, from each list, that are important to them individually.

2. After they have collected their words, asking them to narrow from eight to five to three, and ultimately to a “top word.”

3. Reflecting on the why behind their words, pointing out that many of them may have chosen the same word but for very different reasons.

The overall lesson can take many shapes (I have shared more about my approach here for those curious); however, at the end of the day, the goal is to give students a chance to share their top values and a chance for you to learn and record them. 

Benefit 1: Knowing Your Students’ Values 

What makes this activity so impactful is the information I walk away with as a teacher. Immediately after we are done, I begin recording students’ top values in a spreadsheet, right next to their names. I can duplicate this sheet throughout the school year to ensure that each student’s value is consistently visible to me. Whether taking attendance or recording quiz scores, I appreciate seeing students’ values in as many places as possible.

This practice also includes classmate rosters. I give students a list of their classmates’ names to tape into their spiral notebooks, and we take time to say aloud, and then write down as a class, the top value of each student. In this way, students’ values are visible not just to me but also to their peers. 

Benefit 2: Centering a Values-Driven Lens in the Classroom

I also believe this activity holds me accountable to name and honor our classroom values—which are separate from students’ top values—throughout the year. I affix our classroom values to each desk label and begin the year by talking about them and what I hope they will look like in our classroom community. 

Beyond the opening of the year, though, they give me a lens to communicate to students what we are doing. Whether using an annotation system as a way of leaning into our classroom value of curiosity or setting norms for a Socratic seminar in the spirit of our classroom value of community, I frequently circle back to them to explain the why behind what we are doing.

Another way that I circle back is through classroom surveys. At different points during the school year, I ask students to rate how they feel our classroom community is doing with regard to each of our classroom values—which leads to a group conversation about what is going well and what we can do better. I also model this practice by sharing what I feel I can do better as a teacher to center and honor our classroom values.

Benefit 3: Ideas You Can Return to Throughout the Year

The most sustainable part of this activity is students’ ability to name and reflect on their values as well as the values of others. As noted above, in our classroom, this is not just a one-day lesson but a foundation we can build from. 

In our readings, students frequently consider what different characters’ top values are and how each character’s actions do and do not align with the values that students perceive them to hold. I ask the students to reflect on their perception of what they read and how it does or does not align with their own values. And in our final task of the course, students return to those values and create a multimodal project expressing what they find meaningful about them. Our early-in-the-school-year values activity is just the beginning of what remains a priority all the way to the finish line. 

As I often say to my students, this skill—being able to name and reflect on our values—is one that translates beyond the classroom walls. In my job interview for my current teaching position, for example, one of the first questions that my interviewers asked me was to explain a value that I hold and how it shows up in my teaching practice. In other words, being able to name and reflect on my own top value is the very reason why I have a job that I love. 

Asking students their top value is the first step of many that you can take to create a values-driven classroom—and it is a first step that I very much recommend taking, if you have the chance.