You can repeat this activity as often as grades come out. Students can revisit their factors for what makes a class meaningful and make adjustments, because what is important to them might change. They can give their classes grades every marking period—just as they get grades in each class—and come up with new ideas for making class meaningful.
Variations
We designed this activity for students who get letter grades; if your students get numeric scores or a rubric, they can evaluate their courses accordingly. The students could also grade assignments or units rather than grading the entire course.
Challenges
Some students won’t know what motivates them. For them, this activity is a chance to play with ideas—just as they’re playing with clothing styles, food choices, musical tastes, career aspirations, and romantic interests. Others might have a sense of what makes learning meaningful, but they won’t be able to find words for it on the list or make up their own. You can acknowledge the limits of language—that the vitality that comes with doing meaningful work is felt. In this activity, getting the phrasing exactly right isn’t the point. The point is to become aware of what makes school meaningful so they notice and seize opportunities to do what matters.
Some students might sense a disconnect between the grades and their experiences. Perhaps the grades don’t “feel right” to them. This can happen for several reasons. Some might have chosen factors that don’t actually capture what’s most important to them. They can rethink their factors.
Others might feel awkward if they like certain teachers but don’t find their classes all that meaningful. You can point out that the grades students get aren’t based on how much their teachers like them but rather on how well the students are doing in areas those teachers deem important. You can also review the difference between liking something and finding it meaningful. They’re not grading how much they like the teacher or even the class; they’re basing the grades on how meaningful the classes are to them, according to their own definitions of meaningful.
Giving a class a good grade might feel distressing to students who don’t feel like the teacher values them. Teachers certainly aren’t immune to bias, and some students might feel invisible or invalidated on the basis of race, gender, gender-nonconforming behavior, physical appearance, first language, mental or physical health conditions, or a variety of other factors. Let’s say Kumar values learning about topics that matter in the world, using his creativity, and belonging to a community. In his history class, he does feel he’s learning about important events, doing projects that allow him to be creative, and sitting with three girls who have become his intellectual companions and friends. However, his history teacher often mistakes his playfulness for disrespect while ignoring similar behaviors in his white classmates, and never calls attention to his strengths. Therefore, even though the class itself provides many opportunities for Kumar to put his values into action, he feels conflicted about giving it a good grade. We hope this activity will empower students to see their classes as a context for enacting their own values, even in the face of unfair treatment.
Finally, many students get stuck during the last part of the activity, when they’re asked to think of ways they can make their classes more meaningful. They’re so used to receiving directions and rules that they might struggle when you ask them to think critically and creatively. To inspire students who are having difficulty, you can ask those who do come up with ways to make their classes meaningful to share their strategies. You can also invite older students or alumni to talk about ways they made school meaningful, and encourage students to ask trusted adults for ideas. Even if some students aren’t ready to try anything new, this activity can begin a conversation.
Focus Stickers
Sometimes students genuinely want to change the way they behave but have trouble carrying out a new behavior because they’re so accustomed to an old one. This sort of thing happens in day-to-day life all the time. Perhaps we truly want to go running after work, but we’re used to flopping down on the couch, and by the time we remember that we’d set the intention to run, it’s too late at night.
People are more likely to make values-consistent changes to their behavior when they direct attention toward them (Fitzpatrick et al., 2016; Verplanken & Holland, 2002). In this activity, students make icons to represent values-consistent actions and use the icons as visual cues to fulfill the actions at times when it’s usually hard. It works well in the middle of the school year, once students have established their routines and a sense of who they are in each of their classes.
Materials for Each Student
For this activity, each student will need a pen, paper, three to six dot stickers, and a black permanent marker.
Sample Script
The following sample script gives an idea of how this activity might work in your classroom.
Think of a time when a learning experience went really well. It could be a class, an assignment, or an out-of-school learning experience—maybe on a team, in a club, in a religious or after-school class, or even at home. Try to think of something recent, but it’s okay if you have to think back.
What were you doing, physically and mentally, during that experience? For example, if you took a really great cooking class, maybe you were washing sweet potatoes, shredding kale, using the blender to make sauce, and frying tofu. And maybe you were also listening really carefully about how to cut the sweet potatoes properly and how to make the barbecue sauce. Maybe you were imagining how your family would react if you made them the garlicky greens for dinner. And maybe you were asking a lot of questions and talking to different people in the class about what you were doing.
Describe in as much detail as possible what you were doing during that learning experience—not what someone else was doing, not what you weren’t doing, and not what the experience was like. Mental actions, like thinking and wondering, count as doing something. (Students write their descriptions; some might wish to share what they wrote.)
You’ve now described some of the things you did in a particular learning situation. Some of those actions are probably appropriate to that specific situation but wouldn’t be appropriate in learning situations at school. Washing sweet potatoes makes sense in a cooking class, but you obviously wouldn’t be able to wash sweet potatoes in math class. But if you also wrote that you were helping other people, listening really carefully, imagining possibilities, asking a lot of questions, talking to different people—these are all things you could do in math, English, gym, or Spanish—really any class. Go back through your description and underline actions you could do in several of your different classes, or while working on different kinds of school assignments.
Now pick one of the actions you underlined. Find something you think is particularly important, not just in the context of the learning experience you wrote about but in other situations, too. Circle that action. Would anyone like to share what you picked?
And now you’re going to create a very simple icon to represent the behavior you picked. Make it a simple shape—something you can draw pretty quickly and easily with just a few strokes of a pen. Draw a circle around your icon. (Students draw their icons. Some might wish to share them by drawing them on the board and labeling them with the behaviors they represent. See figure 2.4.)
Figure 2.4: Examples of icons.
Now I’m going to give you a black marker and three dot stickers. With the marker, draw your icon on each of your dot stickers. (Draws icons on stickers and shows them to the class as models.)
Put these stickers in places where they’ll be visual reminders for you to do the behaviors they represent. For example, if your behavior