Portrait of a Graduate Toolkit
What are our hopes and dreams for young people in our community? What skills and dispositions do we want them to be equipped with upon graduation? How can we hold space for the community to engage in co-constructing this vision? How can schools and communities use this to drive their visions and strategic planning?Â
The Portrait of a Graduate (PoG) is designed with communities to answer these questions, providing a vision for climate and culture and teaching and learning within school communities. The Great Schools Partnership PoG toolkit has been built in collaboration with Springfield Public Schools, the Vermont AOE, and individual schools across New England. In it, there is a clear overview of the PoG process, concrete tools to use for each step in the process, and examples of how to use Portraits to drive teaching, learning, and community engagement.
Overview:
- Portrait of a Graduate: What and Why? — This tool articulates what a Portrait of a Graduate is and why it’s important for school communities to have.
- The Portrait of a Graduate Process — This tool provides a framework and includes resources teams can use when undergoing the Portrait of a Graduate (PoG) process.
The Portrait of a Graduate Process
Who has the will, skill, time, and resources to drive in this work? Is the group representative of the community?
In this phase of the Portrait of a Graduate process it’s important to identify a Portrait of a Graduate steering committee. The steering committee will review sample documents and look for inspiration in other Portraits. The steering committee will then schedule recurring design meetings and guide the Portrait along the process.
How can we design sessions to engage with a wide range of members of our community?
What obstacles might prevent us from doing this?
How might we mitigate these obstacles?
In this phase of the Portrait of a Graduate process, it’s important to be intentional about community engagement by reaching out to focus groups of educators and students and by conducting community outreach by setting up booths at school and community events like sporting games, school concerts, back-to-school night, and parent/teacher conferences.
How do we collaborate to synthesize and make meaning of the community input?
How do we collect feedback on a draft of our Portrait?
How can we share our Portrait with the community and celebrate?
During this phase of the process, your steering committee will collect and review the community input to identify patterns and themes to draft a Portrait of a Graduate. It’s important to build in time to share and collect feedback from community members before finalizing. When you are done, be sure to share your Portrait and celebrate with your community. Consider newsletters, social media, and community forums.
How can we use our Portrait to drive Teaching and Learning?
How do we center the Portrait in our community?
After Portraits have been designed, it’s important to plan ways to ensure that the Portrait will guide school and classroom practice. You may establish faculty groups to envision how the elements of the portrait will be integrated into curriculum, assessment, grading and/or reporting, student-led conferences, portfolios, or other elements of the student experience. Or, you may want to invest in yearly practices like student summits, focus groups, or empathy interviews to get feedback on implementation. See what GSP partners have done to bring their Portraits to life.
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