The literati who reside on the coasts are always surprised when progressive educational movements first take root in the vast landmass between the eastern border of California and the western border of Maryland.
I have witnessed this three times in my career. I used to derive malicious pleasure from telling conference attendees that the first statewide implementation of project-based learning occurred via a partnership between the state of West Virginia and the Buck Institute for Education (now PBLWorks). That program was driven by the shared vision of state superintendent Steven Paine and Executive Director of the Office of Instruction Carla Williamson (both have long since retired).
A few years earlier, before my tenure as CEO of the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, West Virginia led the movement toward statewide adoption of the P21 framework. Paine was again a major driver behind the initiative, pushing the legislation through the state government in 2005. West Virginia was quickly joined by Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, among others.
Now that my state, California, is flirting with an education policy focused on Portrait of a Graduate (PoG), I embarked on a research sprint to build background knowledge. I was pleased to learn that the first state to create and adopt a PoG policy was South Carolina. Progressive education was once again led by a “flyover state.”
What has piqued my interest in the Portrait of a Graduate policy process, normally a topic outside the range of my POV, is the potential outsized role generative AI could play in data gathering, assessment, curriculum design, and analysis. More on that later.
Portrait of a Graduate: A Primer
Roman Stearns, founder and executive director of Scaling Student Success, defines a Portrait of a Graduate in this way:
“A Graduate Profile (or a Portrait of a Graduate) is a result of a community-wide engagement process that answers the question: what skills and competencies do we believe our students need to be ready for future success? In essence, a Graduate Profile can be considered a contract between the school district, its students, and the community to do everything within its means to foster the learning outcomes that prepare students for future success, and hold themselves collectively accountable for the results.”
To date, 21 states have created a policy for Portrait of a Graduate profiles, but most of the work occurs at the Local Education Agency (LEA) level. In fact, 101 school districts in California have forged their own work here. (To explore a national overview of the initiative, access this interactive map on the Scaling Student Success website.)
The competencies each community chooses to teach and assess as part of its Portrait of a Graduate vary from locale to locale. In general, they boil down to a list that looks a lot like the 21st Century Skills Framework we developed nearly 20 years ago at P21:
- Problem-Solving
- Communication
- Collaboration and Teamwork
- Creativity and Innovation
- Social Awareness and Responsibility
- Self-Management and Resilience
- Academic or Technical Knowledge
- Digital Literacy
Educational leaders must canvas an enormous group of stakeholders (employers, parents, students, teachers, parents, community leaders, universities, etc.) to create the list of competencies that make it into a final PoG document.
Stephanie DiStasio, who led the original South Carolina initiative, explained how much effort that process entails. “We worked so hard and so long to talk to every stakeholder group we could find,” she said. “We spent a long time hosting meetings and collecting input from everyone, especially community members and employers. We knew that if we didn’t have their buy-in, we would not have success.”
She elaborated on her thinking with co-author David Cook in a piece called “One Goal, Two Journeys: The Role of Community and Workforce in Defining Graduate.” Cook, who was Kentucky’s Director of Innovative Learning from 2010-2024, shared details of a similar process in his state: “Each Local Laboratory of Learning began by building a local coalition of stakeholders using a four-habit design process: Co-created, inclusive, empathetic, and reciprocal. That coalition then charted a course to create a local accountability system by community input.”
This is one of the first places where generative AI could enter the process. Chatbot software is imminently suited to creating multilingual, multimodal survey tools, disseminating those tools, collecting and curating the data, and using a process called sentiment analysis to craft a Portrait of a Graduate that reflects the values of stakeholders. In fact, there is a tiny startup called Factors Education out of Toronto that does just that.
Generative AI can also be helpful in solving one of the thorny issues of the PoG developmental process: Under-representation of marginalized groups. When Stearns and I talked about this possibility, he was enthused by the idea of using weighted data analysis, completed by AI, to reflect the values and goals of groups that may not fully contribute to data collection because of religious, linguistic, cultural, or economic reasons.
How AI Could Help
Based on my conversations with multiple tech companies and organizations that are working in this field, I have identified three major enhancements that generative AI can bring to the Portrait of a Graduate process:
- Creation of survey instruments and related data analysis
- PoG-aligned lesson design
- PoG aligned assessments
Here are a few of the AI-powered solutions that can add efficiency to the Portrait of a Graduate development and implementation process:
- Systems like PowerSchool’s Connected Intelligence centralize district data, allowing educators to analyze and measure progress toward Portrait of a Graduate competencies. These platforms use AI to generate insights, track student development, and assess the fidelity of implementation across schools.
- Platforms such as Xello provide digital portfolios where students’ skills, interests, and academic achievements are tracked and visualized. These tools help schools build a comprehensive Portrait of a Graduate by consolidating evidence of competencies like critical thinking, collaboration, and digital literacy.
- Tools like PowerBuddy allow educators to use natural language queries to access and interpret data related to graduate outcomes, making it easier to monitor and refine the Portrait of a Graduate process.
- The aforementioned startup Factors Education is making an explicit connection between using gen AI tools to collect stakeholder data and converting that into a PoG action plan that includes a lesson generator that accesses a PoG competencies list while designing curriculum.
- Otus tracks student progress in POG-aligned skills while supporting personalized plans for college and career readiness. The platform customizes plans for each student based on aspirations and skill development.
- Panorama Education’s data dashboard Integrates PoG data with other indicators like SAT scores and attendance for a holistic view of student progress. It also maps survey topics to POG frameworks (e.g., social-emotional competencies).
- Wayfinder tracks real-time progress in POG-aligned skills through an intuitive app. The app provides personalized activities for skill-building.
- Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) offers a technology platform specifically designed to document and assess the skills outlined in Portrait of a Graduate frameworks.
- Impacter Pathway provides a customizable platform for schools and districts to measure and develop essential Portrait of a Graduate competencies as grit, compassion, and purpose, using evidence-based, data-driven insights. Their software assesses student growth in soft skills through video and written responses, neuro-linguistic analysis, and performance rubrics, transforming authentic student voice into actionable reports for educators.
What’s Next
Some funding hijinks at the federal level have derailed California’s Portrait of a Graduate process, but there is plenty of room for others to pick up the slack at the LEA level. This work often links to related initiatives, which are ably described in Getting Smart’s Portrait Model. In California, the effort is led by Scaling Student Success and several passionate district superintendents.
According to Stearns, creating a Portrait of a Graduate should not be a controversial idea. “You collect information from all the stakeholders in your community and then create a list of the outcomes that every kid needs to be successful. It doesn’t matter if you’re in rural Butte County or in giant Los Angeles USD. This is more than good practice. All districts should have a whole child vision. “
During our chat, Steans warmed to the idea of AI facilitating the complex task of creating and implementing a Portrait of a Graduate.
“You could give an LEA a prompt, like Impacter Pathway does, and students and parents and community members and business leaders and others can respond to it. Then the AI is massaging all of the data and spitting out a draft product,” Stearns explained. “It’s often hard to get the voices of marginalized students and family members of marginalized students. There tends to be over-representation of students and parents from higher socio-economic levels. And so I think there’s a way through AI to solve this problem. You can use AI to weigh the responses so you can create a more balanced overview of what your community wants.”
Rody Boonchouy, a former colleague at the Buck Institute, is the superintendent of rural Winters Joint USD. He and I chatted over lunch a few weeks ago about this very topic. “So what seems to be gaining traction is the appeal of the graduate profile that you and I have been arguing for for decades is that it focuses on the whole child,” Boonchouy explained. “These are the enduring skills that are needed in a novel, complex and highly technological environment. It’s not about the content – it’s about how you think. What we are making the pitch for is having a graduate profile as the North Star that brings all these programs together. So when you have universal TK or after-school learning or whatever it is to help cultivate these skills, rather than a disparate bunch of disconnected, siloed programs that just exist.”
Sometimes, when you look for the (your) North Star it helps to have a star-gazing app. In California’s fitful pursuit of a coherent approach to Portrait of a Graduate, generative AI may serve that purpose. Anyone who has read my prior work in this space should be used to this refrain: Let AI provide the elbow grease; let humans provide the meaning.
The post How AI Impacts Implementation of Portrait of a Graduate appeared first on Getting Smart.