Is Your Class Valuable? Just Ask ‘Em!

Dear colleague,

This is the year of Value, right? It's been a couple months since I wrote that article, but it's still my take. The great schools of today and tomorrow won't be differentiated by how they approach AI as much as they will be for the degree to which they help students Value the work of learning for many ways in which the work is good.

Last school year, I heard from a school network in Arizona that I've done PD work with in the past. Most recently, the network used a district viewing license to work through the Credibility Mini-Course.

At the end of the year, school leaders invited teachers to do something daring: let's ask our students whether or not our courses were worth their time. Graciously, I got to see what teachers took away from the exercise.

The Good News

Here's what struck me first: 31 out of 34 teachers reported that their students gave similar responses across their classes. This wasn't the scattered feedback you'd expect from a qualitative survey. Students were seeing consistent value—or consistent problems—in each course.

When you see this kind of alignment in qualitative data, it tells you that you're reading something deeper than individual preferences. As we seek to align our teaching with the reality of our students' hearts, such insight is priceless.

One trend in the responses was that students don't just want to know they'll use material someday. They want to see Value now, in forms that matter to them.

• Some students found value in having a creative outlet: “Orchestra provides me with a direct outlet to healing, my life sure hasn't been easy.” This isn't about future career benefits—it's about present emotional necessity.
• Others appreciated embedded life skills. They appreciated learning about how to be an adult in the midst of exploring a subject.
• Others gained confidence through doing hard things. English students valued research paper assignments not just for college prep but because the work “made them more confident in finding quality sources and writing a lengthy paper.” They experienced growth in real-time.
• Others benefitted from knowledge-rich curricula. ASL students didn't just want to learn signs—they were drawn to deaf culture and history, expanding their understanding of human diversity.

All of which demonstrates a key idea about the Value belief: there are lots of ways for a student to get there.

The Bad News

The survey also revealed patterns in the kinds of things that prevented them from finding value in the coursework:

• Overwhelming pace: Multiple classes mentioned stress from workload and requests for slower pacing.
• Accessibility barriers: Unwieldy vocabulary in texts like The Scarlet Letter made comprehension a burden that was too big for some students to bear.
• Insufficient scaffolding: Students wanted more clarity and support, especially for complex assignments.

It's not easy seeing multiple students report problems like these because, ultimately, these are ways we got in our students' way. But the bad news is good news when we look to how we might change our practice to get closer to “just right” amounts of challenge.

So, Ask ‘Em

I think this is a great activity to do even at our current point in the school year. (Unless, of course, you're at the Wall of burnout/demoralization. In that case… try this talk.) Just make a Google Form or a Canvas assignment and ask these two questions:

1. To what degree is this class valuable to you, on a scale of 1-10?
2. Explain your answer as fully as you can in the next five minutes.

Give it a shot, colleague. And remember: the feedback isn't about you as a person, it's about how your students are experiencing your class and about how you can better craft that experience in a way that cultivates the Value belief.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR