This Is the Year of Value

Dear colleague,

Toward the end of last school year as I was coming to grips with the student motivation apocalypse and the implications of AI for schooling today, one idea became clear and recurring: in this coming school year, great teachers and schools will be those mindful of the Value belief.

(You can read a full guide on the Value belief here, or see pp. 101-165 of The Will to Learn.)

So, why is THIS the year of Value?

Part I: Relationships aren't enough.

Schools exist to promote the long-term flourishing of young people by teaching them toward mastery of the disciplines. Lots of institutions (e.g., the family, the church, sports teams) promote the long-term flourishing of young people. Only one does this through the means of teaching kids to master things like science, visual art, English, mathematics, and so on.

This is why it's always driven me a bit nuts when I hear folks say that school is “all about relationships.” Life might be all about relationships — I can grant you that worldview. Relationships might be the most enduring source of beauty and power in schools — I can even go there. But parents don't send their children to school just to have relationships. They send them to school to learn things — to grow toward mastery.

It's our unique role in the relay race of a student's life. Folks count on us to get this done.

So while relationship-focused endeavors are important in schools of all kinds — my own school is entering Year 3 of a successful systematic initiative called “Every Student Known,” which hinges on the methodology of Tracking Attempted Moments of Genuine Connection (see Strategy #1 of The Will to Learn or in this guide) — we can't just sit on our haunches once relational capital is accrued.

No — relational capital has to be used to help develop the rest of the Five Key Beliefs. And the trickiest belief to cultivate nowadays is definitely Value.

Part II: The Value bucket is leaking.

Schools have always struggled to help students genuinely believe that learning is good. In ultra-pragmatic and individualistic cultures like the United States, schools tend to heavily rely on the Value avenues of utility and relevance.

It happens like this. First, our students and communities critique the Value of school along two lines of questioning:

• When am I ever going to use this? (Utility)
• What does this have to do with me, specifically? How does it relate to my interests and goals and plans? (Relevance)

Second, we educators respond to these critiques by making utility- and relevance-based arguments and curricula, hoping that if we can demonstrate the usefulness of mathematics or science or what have you, we'll get learners to see things like we do. But in over-relying on these narrow ways of Valuing learning, we reinforce the utilitarian and individualistic bends in our culture.

So what happens when a culture obsessed with utility and relevance gets flooded with magical algorithmic engagement machines (smartphones) in the 2010s and sophisticated AI tools in the 2020s?

The Value of school plummets.

It's time to return to the broad, inviting reality of the many ways one can Value learning and school.

Part III: Learning is good in all kinds of ways.

Thankfully, the human heart can be drawn to the Value of a thing through more means than mere utility and relevance. When I was working on The Will to Learn throughout the past 10 years, I was originally confounded on all the different ways Value was treated in the research on motivation. How could I best represent all the things in a memorable and useful way for teachers? Years in to the project, I arrived at the Rainbow of Why.

I started experimenting in my own practice with these different avenues to Value. I incorporated beauty and pleasure and meaning into my mini-sermons; I began adding an end-of-unit “What's the most interesting thing we learned about?” Pop-Up Debate; I started highlighting for students how our assignments and exercises gave them autonomy in life, helped them make the world a better place (justice/pro-social), or provided clarity on what they're here for (purpose). And I started noticing similar moves in the classrooms of great teachers I observed when I wasn't teaching myself.

Sure enough, a full-spectrum approach to Value cultivation works remarkably well.

Part IV: The separation is coming.

It is my view that in this coming school year and the few that follow, schools that double down on Value cultivation will separate themselves from schools that do not. Some of these schools will lean heavily on AI; others will forbid its use completely. But what they'll have in common is a keen awareness of how important it is to intentionally and repeatedly and intelligently work at Value cultivation, for all students.

If you're interested in getting started in this kind of work, I recommend the following:

• Mini-sermons that are apologetic in nature, are winsome and sure in tone and paint with the full spectrum of the Rainbow of Why (more on that coming next time, and a full guide on mini-sermons here or on pp. 123-141 of The Will to Learn)
• Creating knowledge-rich learning experiences for your students (what I call a “feast of knowledge” on pp. 142-156 of The Will to Learn) because:
  • It's hard to value what you know little about
  • Knowledge-rich courses imply the depth and Value of a discipline
• Guiding your students in figuring out why the work of learning in your class is Valuable for them (there are specific means through which to do this, and I call them Valued Within exercises; I unpack them on pp. 157-165 of The Will to Learn and in this guide)

Conclusion: I might be crazy… but I don't think so!

I'm not much of a fortune-teller, but I've seen enough in education to be confident in this: in the coming year, both the most fun and the best results will be found by folks who put hard work into improving their Value cultivation game.

Value cultivation is hard, for sure. Especially with the AI-related changes to culture and work and school that none of us opted-in for.

But the good news is twofold:

1. Value cultivation has always been an important skill set with great rewards. The more we help our students value the work of learning, the more they'll be drawn to do that work with care.
2. Value cultivation is learnable, improvable, observable, experimentable stuff. We can all get better at it through the right kinds of practice (outlined in the previous section) and work.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR

P.S. I've got a mini-course on Value that's 50% off until August 15. It's called, “From ‘Why Do We Have to Learn This?' to ‘This is Actually Cool!'” It's 100% asynchronous. Details and registration are ​here​.

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