Preparing students for life after graduation is no easy task, especially in today’s world where career demands exceed simply having the right academic credentials under your belt. School districts across the country have begun to dig deeper, finding collective ways to support students and ensure they’re fully equipped to succeed once they cross the stage at graduation.
Many schools are redefining what success looks like by developing a collective vision of their students’ skills and competencies, commonly known as a “learning profile,” or “portrait of a graduate.” This unifying purpose transcends traditional academic goals and taps into broader objectives like effective communication, creative and critical thinking, and resiliency.
Beginning as early as elementary school, a district’s portrait of a graduate acts as a north star, guiding curriculum and enrichment opportunities and ultimately defining student success.
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While there are many key stakeholders involved in designing the framework, ideally the student is always at the center. Their developmental journey should be personalized, helping them uncover what they’re good at, what they’re passionate about, and where their strengths can take them. It’s crucial that district leadership understands the aspirations of their students and finds ways to connect these aspirations to the district’s overarching vision.
The path to graduation is a long and winding journey, but the starting point to success is understanding how to effectively leverage student data to help young people reach their goals.
Leveraging data for life after graduation
One of my biggest pain points as both an educator and administrator was not having access to data that allowed our district to support the whole child. Although we used a variety of different platforms, they were siloed, usually revolving around a single topic. We reactively used data as it was needed, leaving us stretched to capacity because our team was forced into a variety of different directions to track down critical information.
Like many districts, our data practices remained relatively unchanged for decades. We were still adhering to the traditional metrics we had been programmed for—compliance, programming, tracking, and unfortunately in some cases, categorizing.
Eventually, we had an ‘a-ha’ moment and understood that when data is centralized and consolidated into a single source, it creates a real-time and authentic story for every student, regardless of background, capacity, ability or potential. Synthesizing our multiple data points into a single dashboard painted us a true picture of the student, enabling us to relate, know and understand the whole child.
This ultimately allowed us to offer the right support at the right time. Our “secret sauce” was then connecting this personalized information about our students to our district’s overarching portrait of a graduate—our vision for success.
Creating a connected learning community
Having our students’ data readily available in a single, easy-to-read dashboard allowed us to invite additional stakeholders to the table and build a connected learning community. We completely reimagined our student experience by inviting mentors, school leaders, parents, guardians, community members, coaches, and classroom teachers into the fold to support students as they identified and worked toward their aspirations.
We created a village of leaders both in and out of the school system, and they all played an important role in the success of our students. As we gathered student information, data was inputted into a single source that was easily accessible, allowing the connected learning community to easily interpret the information and respond in real time.
For our district, our entry point into connecting students’ aspirations to our overarching vision was within our K-5 community. We facilitated multiple experiences relating to the competencies of our portrait of a graduate, allowing students to document their developmental journey around their interests and skill sets.
Using educational software with gaming features, students worked toward goals like effective communication, problem solving and leveraging technology. As student data was created, we were able to track development and share both progress and challenges in a single dashboard with their circle of support. From this, we drove interactions, had meaningful conversations and created even more individualized and relevant experiences for our students.
Ultimately, we were able to turn data into something usable—creating spaces where we could educate our students and empower an entire community to leverage what we’ve learned. We found a way to connect “what do you want to be when you grow up” with an authentic and relevant plan of real-time support.
Consolidating data enables us to effectively understand and leverage it, ensuring leaders keep the students at the center of their learning experience. Putting the right people at the table armed with valuable insights generates widespread belief in our schools and belief in our students. And it helps students understand how this information can create exciting pathways to their future, allowing them to be their authentic selves, and positioning them to thrive in life after graduation and in their community.
