Browse Content
Featured Content
Life Worth Living is an initiative of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School.
2025 School Curriculum Design Competition
Your students' lives are too important to be guided by anything less than what matters most.
Secondary school educators are invited to submit a curricular plan designed around the book Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, for prizes up to $1,500.
Help your students integrate
the best of their
intellectual energies with
their most profound
existential questions.
Around the world and across human history, the same questions have challenged us: What should we hope for? How should we live? How do we respond to suffering? How do we flourish?
Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz have gathered responses to these and other questions and reflected on the different answers that have informed various faiths and cultures. They have led students through these findings in one of Yale University’s most popular courses. They have written Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most to help students of all ages—lifelong learners—respond to these questions in the context of their own lives.
Now it’s your turn to help your students integrate the best of their intellectual energies with their most profound existential questions. Because your students’ lives are too important to be guided by anything less than what matters most.
Secondary school educators are invited to submit a curricular plan designed around the book Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. The first prize winners will receive $1,500. Honorable mentions will also receive prizes of $500.
The application opens on January 31, 2025. Click below to apply!
Submit your curricular planby August 29, 2025.
Get to know our 2024 prizewinners!
Held for the first time during summer 2024 by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, the Life Worth Living Secondary School Curriculum Design Competition invites secondary school educators to submit a curricular plan designed around the book Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
.jpeg)
Living the Questions
Michael LoStracco of William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, PA is the first prize-winner of the 2024 Life Worth Living Secondary School Curriculum Design Competition. Michael designed a course called “Living the Questions: Approaches toward a Life Worth Living,” the curriculum of which he will build out in consultation with the Life Worth Living team at Yale throughout 2025 before teaching his completed curriculum in fall 2025. Michael’s full curriculum will be promoted and shared on the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and Life Worth Living websites for other secondary school educators to adopt and adapt.
Honorable Mentions
Honorable mentions for the 2024 Life Worth Living Secondary School Curriculum Design Competition include Joy Craun of Grinnell High School in Grinnell, IA (proposed course: “The Art of Living”); Jacob Root of Grace Church School in New York, NY (proposed course: “Life Worth Living”); and Ryan Stewart of Libertas Academy Charter School in Springfield, MA (proposed course: “Life Worth Living”). Each honorable mention received a $500 prize for their curricular plan submission.
Application Instructions
Applicant Eligibility
Any public, private, or independent secondary school teacher or administrator worldwide is eligible to submit a curricular plan.
Requirements for Your Curricular Plan
- Course Description (100-200 words)
- Syllabus (template here and available for download below)
- Unit Lesson Plans (for the three units developed in the syllabus): This is an opportunity to craft a vision of the daily classroom experience for your Life Worth Living course. You are welcome to use lesson plan templates required by your school. If not using a lesson plan template, please represent the following elements in your lesson plans.
- Big question(s) explored in the lesson
- Lesson goals and/or objective(s)
- Texts to be discussed
- A breakdown of activities that engage students in questions and objectives with approximate time budgets
- Any scaffolding needed to introduce, connect to, or remind students of upcoming assignments
- Final Assignment Design (rubric not required): How will your students cap off the course? How can the final assignment give them ways to exercise their existential muscles?
- Letter of Support: A letter of support from either your department chair or principal (required if you are department chair), addressing...
- Fit of the course in the school’s curriculum and/or state requirements
- Assessment of the applicant’s ability to complete the design and teach the course
Important Dates
Application Window Opens on Friday, January 31, 2025
Curricular Plan Application Due on Friday, August 29, 2025
Winners announced by Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Curricular Plan Criteria
- Student engagement
- Centered in life’s big questions
- Personal discovery by encouraging students to see themselves in dialogue with voices from a diverse set of cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions as they explore big questions
- Activities that foster community and create room for students to hear from one another and learn from each other’s life experiences
- Assignments that invite students to ask what makes life most worth living and to reply with their lives
Prizes
First Prize: $1,500
Honorable Mentions: $500*
*Multiple honorable mention prizes may be awarded
FAQs
Who is eligible to submit a curricular plan? Any public, private, or independent secondary school teacher or administrator worldwide.
What if the constraints of my context vary significantly from the assumptions made in some of the application materials? Do your best to make changes to our template as needed. Most of all, stick to the thought: if I were to design a course around this book to be taught in my context, how would I best do that? If you still have questions, feel free to email lifeworthliving@yale.edu.
What if I want to work as a team? This is allowable, and prizes will be shared!
Do I have to be able to teach this Life Worth Living class? We hope that you have the opportunity to teach this class, but it’s not a requirement for submission. We know that each school has its own process for developing and adopting new courses.
Email lifeworthliving@yale.edu with any questions.
Submit your curricular plan by August 29, 2025.
Download the Life Worth Living Syllabus Template
Download and edit this syllabus template to submit with your curricular plan!
Educate your students for the lifelong pursuit
of the good life.
We promote truth-seeking conversations across enduring lines of difference in secondary and higher education classrooms around the world.
About Life Worth Living
Through our courses in Yale College, collaboration with a global network of educators, and public outreach for life-long learners, the Life Worth Living program aims to facilitate conversation on questions of meaning and purpose across important and enduring lines of difference.
A Yale student once complained to one of us: "You mean the world's great traditions have been wrestling with the big questions of life for 3,000 years, and now I'm supposed to invent my own answers—and in my free time?" These are fair concerns. The fact is that, while we do need to respond to each of these questions ourselves, we don't need to do so alone. We can—we should—take up the big questions of life in conversation with one another and with the world's cultural, philosophical, and religious traditions. And we don't need to do this in our free time. We can take up these questions in our classrooms and in intentional, dedicated space in our daily lives.
The Life Worth Living Program invites students, teachers, and lifelong learners to marry the best of their intellectual energy to the most profound of their existential questions. We hope you'll join us. We have much to learn from one another!