How to Upgrade Your Family Values About Learning
Reading time: 10 minutes
Are Your Values About Learning Strong Enough?
This is a fun interactive exercise to identify and improve your family values. Use it to clarify your own thinking and as a way to involve your kids.
Most homeschooling families place an emphasis on strong family values. We think every family should have strong written statements about those things that you feel are most important.
| Values are defined as principles, standards or qualities that an individual, family, or group of people hold in high regard. They guide the way we live our lives and the decisions we make. |
We usually think about values as things like character, faith, honesty, and generosity.
But there’s another important topic to include. Consider this question “Are my family values about learning strong enough to support its importance?” While you likely emphasize the importance of learning to your kids, have you considered incorporating this into a much stronger set of statements for emphasis?
Here’s an easy four step exercise that can help you do this and make it a fun interactive experience at the same time where you include your kids. Check it out:
Step One: Examine Your Existing Values on Learning
Step Two: Prepare for Your Family Meeting
Step Three: Hold the Family Value Workshop
Step Four: Post It and Use It
This exercise uses a form of family brainstorming and group decision making, which provide good opportunities to practice these skills in your family. Younger children may not have enough experience to participate in this exercise. Read this all the way through for appropriateness before you decide to use it.
Step One: Begin by Examining Your Existing Values on Learning
Take 10 minutes to complete it.
You – the parent, start this exercise by individually evaluating what you have emphasized (and stated) up to now. Don’t be critical of your past efforts – just get your ideas down.
The values you hold, and express to your children, serve as an important foundation. Values about learning can positively influence your child’s commitment to learning.
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My Worksheet on Our Values about Learning 1. List our family values toward learning. What do we say to our kids about it? What do we tell them is important about learning? (Build a list of bullet points – what have you been communicating to your child? You may want to use a larger paper worksheet for this) Start with Learning is very important to us because:
2. What are this family’s strong beliefs about how we learn new things? (This should help you add ideas to #1)
3. Dig a little deeper. How does becoming a better learner help us to better accomplish what we believe to be important? For example, serving others? Or better, serve a higher purpose?
4. Looking at #1, 2, and 3 above, how can I strengthen these statements? What can I add? How can I appeal to what is important to my kids and their own aspirations?
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| If you found this exercise difficult – this is OK – It provides a useful starting point to thinking more about what you want to say about learning! Talk to other adults to get ideas. The Learning Worksheet in step 3 has more ideas for you. |
Step Two: Prepare for Your Family Meeting
Now that you have completed step one, you have formed fundamental ideas you can use to guide the upcoming meeting discussion. Your role is to lead and make sure the family comes up with a good list of ideas. You want your kid’s inputs because you want their “ownership” of these values, but you also want to shape and guide the thinking.
Your goal is to build a list that all family members think is a really good list.
What do you need to do to prepare for this meeting beforehand? Here’s some things you should do and put together in advance.
- It’s a good idea to give your kids some background. Talk about why you want to have a meeting about learning values. Talk about the expected outcomes of this exercise. Share with them why you are doing this – because you value their opinion.
- Schedule the meeting. Give it a formal name of importance like “Deciding on Our Family Values about Learning.” We recommend setting aside at least 30 minutes for it. More if you have lots of kids participating.
- Arrange to have a white board or flip chart ready to write down everyone’s ideas. It’s important that everyone can see the list as you build it. This makes it easier to add to existing ideas, and to have the subsequent discussion to narrow the list to the final one.
- In advance of the meeting, spend some time explaining the importance of having good family values about learning. You create positive expectations by sharing why you want to have a great set of values about learning.
- Have pens pencils and note pads for writing down ideas. Everybody should be writing ideas down.
- Print out a Worksheet of Sample Learning Values for each person. This will help guide the group’s thinking. If you have a different list, print that out. This helps the members generate ideas. (Note: You don’t have to use our list, but you do need a list of good statements. Otherwise, some members may have trouble coming up with ideas because they are not sure what kind of statements you are looking for)
- Treat this a learning activity. Show your kids what good meeting skills look like.
- Have cookies and treats ready to give out for good ideas!
That’s it! Now you are ready for your meeting.
Step Three: Hold the Family Value Workshop
Here’s the things you want to do when you start the meeting.
Your Opening Statement
Start your meeting by making comments similar to these. You want to give the group a “charter” – a sense of purpose. It can be both serious and fun at the same time.
“Family values involve the most important ideas of how we want to live our lives, and they are often passed down to successive generations. They help define behavior in various situations, help us make good choices, and strengthen the bond that we have. We want to have an awesome set of values, and we want all of us to decide what they are. We’ll then put them in writing so we can refer to them time to time.
Our values are important because they help us to grow and develop. – The decisions we make reflect our values and beliefs, and they are important because they direct us toward specific and better purposes.
Learning is one of our important family values. Let’s work together to define it.”
How to Run the Meeting
- Explain how this meeting will work and what the expected outcome is. Establish time limits. State the ground rules for making decisions.
- Hand out the Worksheet of Sample Values to give each family member if they ae old enough to understand these ideas. Explain these are only suggestions and you are free to come up with your own ideas.
- Ask each member to read it and individually jot down their own ideas for value statements but without discussion yet with others. Ask them to think beyond this list – try to capture your own original thinking. We will share and discuss these later.
- Your first step is to build a group list on the whiteboard. Begin collecting ideas first by a “round robin” technique where each person gets to provide one value statement per round. List statements where everyone can see them. You may ask questions for clarification or background. (“Why do you think that is important?”) Encourage members to build new ideas on other member’s ideas – this is called extension. Keep going around until you think you have a good list of really good ideas.
- Ask, “Does everyone feel we have a great list of value statements about learning?”
- Your next step is to narrow down this list through family discussion. You can use different methods to do this. The goal is a short list of core statements that express well your family values about learning. Try these: Look for themes in the ideas. Combine similar ideas. Generate new ones. Rewrite statements and get everyone to agree on the wording. Let everyone know that culling out an idea does not mean it is unimportant; it just means there are other ideas that are more important or more comprehensive.
- Set your goal for a manageable number of core statements. You don’t want to end up with a list that is so long that it is confusing. We recommend a list of 10 to 15 statements.
- Agree to the list. Make sure everyone is “on board.” Reward yourselves with a cookie.
Worksheet of Sample Learning Values
| Use this as it is or expand and modify it. These provide a starting point for your discussion
Add more of your ideas to this list. Use it as a starting point
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Step Four: Post It and Use It
Did you get it done? Then post it and use it to guide your conversations on learning.
Here’s some ideas as you move forward.
- Take the whiteboard or flipcharts and edit the statements for clarity if necessary. But don’t change them too much as you may risk losing ownership if you do.
- Put them in digital form and distribute them
- Hand this out in your next family meeting and talk about them once again.
- You can make this a working document where you periodically update and improve it. Strive to make the statements richer, deeper, and better over time.
- Frequently refer back to the statements and use them to guide your homeschooling and future conversations on learning.
Clear and compelling value statements serve as the anchor to your future conversations on getting better at “learning and college-readiness.”
