how to refer to fields with multiple values in node--content-type template
I managed to accomplish this by appending [value] to the end of the field_tag array. Then by using the 'count' function I created a for loop to iterate through each value like so

$j = count($content['field_tags']);
for( $i = 0; $i &lt; $j; $j+= 1){
    if(render($content['field_tags'][$i]) != ''){
        print "&lt;span class='customClass ".$i."'&gt;";
        print render($content['field_tags'][$i]);
        print "&lt;/span&gt;";
    }
}


Note: For some reason I had to insert a check for if the tag was empty because the array ended up being a lot larger than the number of the tags.