Celebrate Your School’s Core Values With Monthly Themes

Most schools can tell you what their values are. Far fewer can show you.

The mission statement lives on the website, in the handbook, on a banner in the main hallway. Families read it during the admissions process and nod. What they actually want to know — what they’re quietly evaluating all year — is whether those values are real. Whether Courage means something specific at this school, or whether it’s just a word someone chose for the handbook twenty years ago.

Photos are how you answer that question. Not the posed, professional kind. The kind that show a student actually doing something courageous — raising her hand with the wrong answer, trying the sport she’s never played, standing up in assembly. Those photos are the proof. And most schools don’t have a system for capturing them.

The Gap Between Events and Culture

Event photos are easy. There’s a game, a performance, a field trip — and someone shows up with a camera. The result is a strong record of what happened, but a thin record of who the school is.

Culture photos are harder. They happen between events, in classrooms and hallways and on fields when nothing official is being documented. A student helping a classmate who’s stuck on a problem. A team genuinely supporting each other after a difficult loss. A kindergartner teaching something to a younger student she met at lunch. Those moments are fleeting, and they disappear if nobody is looking for them.

A monthly theme gives your staff a reason to look.

How to Set It Up

Choose ten values or themes that reflect your school’s mission — one for each month of the school year. They might include:

• Teamwork
• Curiosity
• Courage
• Belonging
• Creativity
• Respect
• Imagination
• Stewardship
• Sportsmanship
• Caring

At the start of each month, create a dedicated album in Vidigami named for that month and value — September – Teamwork, October – Curiosity. Share the upload link with teachers and ask them to contribute photos throughout the month that show the value in action.

The key word is action. Not a poster about Teamwork. Not a group shot from the team banquet. A moment where you can actually see it happening.

Getting the Whole Community Involved

The monthly theme works because it gives teachers a creative brief rather than an open-ended ask. “Please take more photos” goes nowhere. “This month, look for Courage” is something a teacher can actually do while walking between classes.

Students can be part of it too. For younger students, talk through what the monthly value looks like in real life. Ask them to tell you when they spot it. They become observers of their own school culture in a way that makes the values feel lived rather than assigned.

For older students, consider handing them a device — a tablet, an older phone, an iPad — and giving them the same brief as the teachers. A student photographer looking for Courage in October will find moments that no administrator would think to document. Once a week, the teacher uploads whatever was captured to the month’s album.

Making It a Habit

Recognition matters. At the end of each month, celebrate contributions — not just for volume, but for quality and creativity. A few categories worth acknowledging: most creative interpretation of the theme, best cross-grade moment, most unexpected example of the value. A gift card, recess duty coverage, or a shout-out at the staff meeting costs very little and goes a long way toward making this a habit rather than a chore.

After a few months, something shifts. Teachers start noticing moments because they have a place to put them. The monthly theme becomes a lens, not a task.

What You Have at the End of the Year

Ten albums. Ten values. A visual record of your school’s mission in action — not as you describe it in the handbook, but as it actually happened, month by month, across every grade and program.

That library has real uses. Admissions teams can pull from it to show prospective families what Courage looks like at this school, specifically — not a stock photo, not a professional shoot, but a real moment from a real student. Communications teams can build the October newsletter around Curiosity without scrambling for content. The head of school can open a faculty meeting in April with a slide of the year’s best photos under this month’s theme and the room feels the evidence of what they built together.

And ten years from now, when that student who was photographed in the middle of something brave is a graduate, that photo is part of the archive that says: this was who you were here.