The weeks before students return to campus are among my favorite times of the year. For me, the anticipation in the air is palpable. It is a time of new beginnings, lofty goals, and renewed energy.
Likely, you’ve already started reflecting on what you want from the upcoming school year. Perhaps you’ve already picked out room decor or started lesson planning. But before you get too far, we would like to offer a few summer work suggestions that prioritize the most important thing we do as Christian educators—help our students with biblical worldview formation.
Most educators fail to identify key areas of formation in the school environment. I like to refer to this as the “Hidden Curriculum of Christian Schools.” While we often think about worldview formation in the formal curriculum, such as subject-area content, the hidden curriculum is a powerful and often overlooked area of formation. Hidden curriculum refers to the unwritten, unofficial, and often unintended lessons, values, and social norms that students learn in school. In Christian schools, the hidden curriculum can reinforce and even teach students to think biblically, or, if not intentionally analyzed, confuse our students. Here are three areas of worldview formation to consider this summer:
Formation Through Systems
Schools are often champions and models for systems and processes. With the complexities of multiple age groups, offerings, and the number of students, life in a school without systems would be chaotic. We have systems for everything: car line, inclement weather, course registration, emergency drills, tryouts for sports and clubs, absence reporting, and more.
However, if we believe that God has something to say about all areas of our lives, it means God not only cares about our systems but, as a God of order, models for us the value of considering how those systems contribute to human flourishing. Many of us have been “doing school” for so long, and we are long overdue to consider how God has shaped those systems. Here are a few areas worth considering:
- Classroom procedures – Like many educators, I spent my first few years in the classroom with Harry Wong’s The First Days of School on the corner of my desk. His book helped me understand how essential classroom procedures were and drove me to develop systems and procedures for myself and my students. And they worked! I rarely had discipline issues and was convinced that order was the only way I could survive.
But that was also a problem. The routines and procedures primarily helped me by minimizing chaos and providing a calm environment (which also served students). But it wasn’t until I revisited Harry Wong’s text years later that I stumbled across this quote, which shifted my thinking about procedures: “By introducing procedures in the classroom, you are also introducing procedures as a way of living a happy and successful life.” That sounds a lot like worldview formation! We understand that habitual ways of being are ⅙ of a biblical worldview and essential for living out the Gospel in the Christian life.
- Standards – In the past decade, Christian educators and accrediting agencies have largely agreed that academic content standards are important for ensuring rigor, consistency, and alignment throughout the school. It makes sense that we don’t want our students to have gaping holes in their understanding of math and science. But fewer schools are grappling with how to ensure the same level of quality control when it comes to doing the very thing we say we are about—worldview formation. The Standards for Biblical Worldview Formation can be a part of the same lesson-planning and mapping process used in American History, Chemistry, and second-grade language arts.
- Grading Systems – Does our current system reflect historical educational practices or our understanding of growth and human nature? Does it allow students to learn from mistakes, improve, and try again without being defined by failure?
Formation Through Physical & Digital Learning Spaces
One of the easiest traps to fall into during back-to-school preparation is believing that the classroom is simply a container for learning. We spend hours arranging desks, organizing supplies, creating bulletin boards, and decorating our walls because we know the environment matters. The question is how it matters.
If biblical worldview immersion is about intentionally creating experiences and environments that shape students, then our classrooms are never neutral. Before students hear our lesson, they’ve already begun receiving messages from what they see. The physical environment quietly teaches all day long.
Here are a few areas worth considering:
- Classroom Walls & Decorations – I have had the joy of walking into some beautifully curated classrooms nationwide. But beautiful and formative are not always the same thing. Many of us have filled our walls with colorful posters, inspirational sayings, and decorations from the teacher store or Teachers Pay Teachers without ever asking whether they actually reinforce a biblical understanding of reality. Some displays intentionally point students toward God’s truth. Others are merely decorative. Still others unintentionally communicate messages rooted in secular ideology and promote individualism, self-esteem culture, or even other competing worldviews.
Instead of asking, “Does this look good?” we must ask, “What is this teaching?” Could bulletin boards become interactive tools that continually point students back to Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration? Could anchor charts include questions that invite students to think biblically throughout the year rather than simply decorate empty wall space? The goal isn’t more decorations; it’s more intentional ones.
- Seating arrangements – Few teachers arrange a classroom at random. We know the physical layout affects behavior, attention, and collaboration. But seating arrangements communicate more than classroom management. Rows, circles, and table groups communicate something about what we believe about living and learning alongside other image-bearers.
When we approach seating arrangements from a biblical worldview, we consider how they can teach and communicate stewardship, service, collaboration, creativity, and responsible independence. Before you post those seating charts or tape down name tags, consider how your arrangement will help students practice habits that shape their understanding of work, community, and their role in God’s world.
- Artificial Intelligence – Perhaps no part of the learning environment is changing more rapidly than the digital one. Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a daily companion for students and teachers alike. Like every educational tool, AI offers remarkable opportunities—but it also carries assumptions about knowledge, learning, creativity, and even what it means to be human.
Rather than asking only “How should we use AI?” Christian educators should first ask, “What vision of humanity is this technology encouraging?” Whether you’ve decided that AI is a friend or a foe, the more important decision is to consider how a biblical worldview will inform how you see, interpret, and engage with AI this coming school year. Consider this resource to help you explore a biblical worldview of AI and its implications for school life.
Formation Through Relationship
Every school has a relational culture. Whether intentionally or not, students are constantly learning how people ought to treat one another by watching the adults around them. Jesus told his disciples that the world would recognize his followers by their love for one another—not simply by the accuracy of their theology. If Christian schools exist to help students develop a biblical worldview, then our relationships cannot simply support learning; they are part of what students are learning.
Everyday interactions quietly shape students’ understanding of God’s design for community, and with adults in positions of authority, they can communicate what to value. Here are a few areas worth considering:
- Staff Alignment – It’s been said that culture is often caught long before it is taught. Students notice far more than we think. They observe whether teachers speak respectfully about one another, whether departments collaborate or compete, whether administrators serve teachers or simply supervise them, and how conflict is handled when it inevitably arises.
When faculty members operate as isolated individuals, students often absorb that same individualism. But when teachers model humility, encouragement, accountability, and genuine partnership, they offer students a living picture of the Body of Christ functioning as it was designed. This is true in every direction: Peer-to-peer relationships among teachers matter. Leader-to-teacher relationships matter. Even the way meetings are conducted, decisions are communicated, and disagreements are resolved communicates something about authority, service, forgiveness, and unity. Perhaps before asking, “Do our students model biblical community?” we should first ask, “Do they see it among us?”
- Parent Engagement – Many schools say they value parents. Fewer consistently treat them as essential partners in the formative work of education. From the opening pages of Scripture, God places the primary responsibility for the nurture and instruction of children within the family. Christian schools were never intended to replace parents but to come alongside them.
Yet it is surprisingly easy to begin to view parents as interruptions to our work rather than as participants in it. Communication becomes reactive instead of relational. Conferences become moments of defense rather than collaboration. Families become customers to manage, rather than image bearers entrusted with the same child we have been called to serve.
Regular communication with parents will share academic progress, but what if it also communicated shared formative goals? That doesn’t mean you give parents an assessment of their child’s worldview formation. It means welcoming parents into the life of the classroom where appropriate, assuming goodwill before suspicion, listening before defending, and shedding light on how you’re partnering in formation in your classroom. These practices have the potential not only to improve school satisfaction but also to reinforce a biblical understanding that children flourish best when the family and the Christian community labor together.
Students may or may not remember your lesson on fractions, Shakespeare, or the scientific method, but they will remember what it felt like to be in your classroom. They will remember what was celebrated, how mistakes were handled, whether people were treated with dignity, and what your classroom quietly taught about what is right, true, good, and beautiful.
-Dr. Maggie Pope
Educator Resources
- Train-the-Trainer – Whether you’re a small Christian school or a multi-site system, Train-the-Trainer is for you. Send a team of leaders or educators to be trained by Dr. Erdvig and Dr. Pope in leading the charge for biblical worldview immersion on your campus. Not only will you receive in-person small-group training, but you’ll also walk away with licensing to use Summit training materials and a reviewed personal action plan to get started. Learn more and join us in Colorado this coming September!
- Omaha Biblical Worldview Immersion Conference – Why not start 2027 with training in how to nurture biblical worldview formation in your students? Join us for the Biblical Worldview Immersion Conference on January 4 and 5, 2027, hosted by Omaha Christian High School in Omaha, Nebraska.