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EdCast

Portraits of a Better High School Graduate

CASEL's Andrew Tucker discusses the growing trend of Portraits of a Graduate and how schools prepare students — not just for college — but for careers and lifelong success
Graduation caps being tossed

How do we address gaps in education and prepare students to thrive in an evolving workforce? Andrew Tucker, director of policy at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), says adopting Portraits of a Graduate (POG) in K–12 education is one way. POG are frameworks, adopted by a state or district, that define the skills and competencies students should have upon graduation, extending beyond academic benchmarks. 

“For a long time — maybe generations really — in our K–12 system, we've really focused on a single metric for success, and that's been a four-year college degree,” says Tucker. “We're beginning to recognize that there are other opportunities and other options for students and that we actually need to prepare students beyond just those minimum academic requirements that exist for enrollment into a four-year college.”

As part of a CASEL report this year, Tucker highlights how states and districts are adopting POG to equip students with essential "durable skills" like critical thinking, collaboration, and emotional intelligence. About 20 states have created these frameworks. He explains that these portraits are developed with input from diverse stakeholders — educators, parents, employers, and community members — and aim to address the disconnect between what schools teach and the skills employers and society demand. Some states like Nevada, North Carolina, and Utah are implementing these frameworks and aligning them with career and social-emotional learning goals.

Tucker emphasizes that POG have potential to enhance student readiness for college, careers, and life, particularly as "human skills" become increasingly critical in an era shaped by AI and automation.

“We're in the era of AI. And artificial intelligence is going to be taking the place of a lot of the technical skills that people need. And what's going to be left? What's going to be left are these human skills,” Tucker says. “So we have to, as a society, and as an education system, and as a broader workforce system, we have to define these things in ways that there's a common language.”

In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Tucker calls on educators and policymakers to embrace Portraits of a Graduate as a means to foster an equitable, relevant, and future-focused education.

 

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. 
[DRUMS, MUSIC PLAYING]

Many US schools are redefining what it means to be prepared for life after high school. Andrew Tucker says it's going to take more than academics. He's the director of policy at CASEL who released a report detailing Portraits of a Graduate, or really visions of what the skills, mindset, and qualities students will have when they graduate.

He says it's only a matter of time before most districts develop such a vision, and it's needed because focusing solely on college degrees is not the only path to success. There are already at least 20 states that have, or are developing, these portraits with stakeholders across their communities to better align with real world demands. I asked Andrew why states and schools are rethinking what it means to graduate high school.

Photo of CASEL's Andrew Tucker
Andrew Tucker

ANDREW TUCKER: I think for a long time-- maybe generations really-- in our K-12 system, we've really focused on a single metric for success, and that's been a four-year college degree. And I think that we're beginning to recognize that there are other opportunities and other options for students and that we actually need to prepare students beyond just those minimum academic requirements that exist for enrollment into a four-year college. Most graduation requirements historically have been aligned to those four year college entrance requirements, such as four years of English, three years of math, three years of science, et cetera. And so I think that we're beginning to see that folks are recognizing that we need to prepare students not just for college, but for careers and for their entire futures, whatever that may look like.

JILL ANDERSON: One of the things that you've studied and released a report on this past year is looking at a Portrait of a Graduate. So what is a Portrait of a Graduate?

ANDREW TUCKER: Portrait of a graduate is really a way for states and, in many cases, districts-- both types of entities are beginning to develop Portraits of a Graduate in quite large numbers, actually. It's really a vision of what students will graduate with, the types of skills they'll graduate with, the types of dispositions they'll have. And they're typically informed by a broad community stakeholder input. They reach out and they speak to parents, and students, and employers in the community, and post-secondary education institutions, and chambers of commerce, and many, many different types of entities to get input on what it really is that students need in order to be successful in career and in life.

JILL ANDERSON: What can you tell me about the history of these documents, I guess we can call them? How did this idea develop?

ANDREW TUCKER: I think they developed from the recognition that we really need to understand what it is that folks need. I think that, for a long time, we have heard from both post-secondary education institutions and from employers that they receive students-- no better way to say it-- who don't have the skills that they need in order to be successful. And so we, as K-12 educators, have come to understand that, indeed, we need to prepare students differently.

And therefore, in order to do that, what might that vision look like? And that vision can look like a Portrait of a Graduate. Not that people weren't thinking about it before then, but I think it's become far more prevalent and actually quite the trend, if you will, in the past 5 to 10 years, but really picked up steam in the 2020s.

JILL ANDERSON: And the report you wrote looked at what is going on with these across the United States. So tell me a little bit about how prevalent this is.

ANDREW TUCKER: CASEL looked at a variety of things. It looked at states across the country to see how prevalent this was and what these Portraits of a Graduate reflected. And we focused on five specific examples. We looked at the Portrait of a Learner in Nevada, the Portrait of a Graduate in North Carolina, the Talent MAP in Utah, the Profile of a Graduate in Washington, and the Career Ready Skills in Pennsylvania. What you'll notice there is that only one of them is called a Portrait of a Graduate. So these have lots of different names and lots of different iterations, and they look different ways. But there are some commonalities in all of them.

JILL ANDERSON: And we'll talk about that. I'm curious why you decided to look specifically at these five states.

ANDREW TUCKER: We looked more broadly than that to really see how broad it was. In the report, we found about 20 states had something that resembled a Portrait of a Graduate, whether it was called that or something else. And then we just picked the five examples that showed the breadth of examples that were out there, because we were interested in a number of things.

We were interested in how they connected social and emotional learning and social emotional competencies to the Portrait of a Graduate, which is one of those commonalities that I talked about. We were also really interested in looking at how they were developed, and what types of stakeholders were included in the development of them. And these five examples really showed that breadth of development.

JILL ANDERSON: One of the things I've noticed is that some districts have these Portraits, and they're not statewide. And you just mentioned about 20 states have it as well. Is there a benefit to this being a statewide initiative versus a district one?

ANDREW TUCKER: I think it really depends, but yes, I think there's a benefit to being statewide. And I would suggest it's a benefit because it signals that the state recognizes there are multiple paths for students. And I think that that's important from a state-level policy perspective, is that the state recognizes that students come from lots of different backgrounds, have lots of different goals, and that education in their state needs to be individualized to meet those individual needs of the students.

JILL ANDERSON: How challenging is it to get something like this in place at the state level?

ANDREW TUCKER: I think it can be very challenging. This does not happen overnight. Much like most state policies, in education, we know that the vast majority of states have broad local control. So what the state says is sometimes not mandatory. But this is visionary. And state Portraits of a Graduate are generally that-- they are visions.

They are not necessarily "thou shalt." They are instead visions of what that learner and what our graduates look like. It's hard. It takes time. It takes tremendous buy-in and tremendous amounts of input from stakeholders across the state and across the educational ecosystem in order to develop these Portraits.

JILL ANDERSON: It seems like the states that you featured in the report-- were many of them in the process of developing this and putting it together?

ANDREW TUCKER: Yeah, the five states that we highlight had all fully developed their Portraits, yet there were still things that they were working to do to get it implemented. So there's one thing about having your website with your image saying, this is what we believe the portrait should be. And the next major step that states are continually working on is, what does that look like on the ground? How do you truly implement that? And that might include getting states to develop their own Portrait or Profile of a Graduate that would mirror the states or reflect the state's Portrait of a Graduate. But it also can be just as simple as releasing guidance on how you might implement this work at the classroom level.

JILL ANDERSON: What are some of the most common skills featured in these Portraits?

ANDREW TUCKER: So the skills that we saw featured most commonly are really durable skills. The skills you, and I, and everyone who's a professional needs in order to be successful in life. That we are not seeing in these Portraits that you need, for example, to be able to change a light bulb.

Now, we're not seeing technical skills. What we're seeing are these durable, A.K.A., soft skills. I hate the term "soft skills," or durable skills, which is a great term because when we use the term durable, they're things that once you learn them, they're durable. You maintain them. So we're seeing skills like critical thinking and problem solving. Those are two skills were the most common in the portraits that we reviewed. Social awareness and being an active citizen, communication skills, self-management skills, academic and technical knowledge, collaboration and teamwork, et cetera. So it's really about durable skills.

JILL ANDERSON: What about the SEL element to this? I often think of SEL, and I'm sure a lot of folks do, as something you hear a lot about at the elementary level in education, but you don't hear about it as much as students get older, and what that looks like, and why that's even important for high-school-aged kids.

ANDREW TUCKER: Great question. I think that, oftentimes, we don't see that. And we think that SEL-- Social and Emotional Learning-- is really about knowing how to make friends, and how to manage your emotions, and things like that. But let's remember that those same things are required in the workplace. 
We have to be able to manage our emotions in the workplace. We have to be able to build relationships, and collaborate, and understand one another, and take each other's perspectives, and be self-confident, and have self-discipline, and impulse control, and all of these types of things that are social and emotional skills. So when we think about development of these skills beyond the elementary level, but as you develop in middle school and high school, it's really about learning and having these experiences that help you to refine these skills and refine these competencies so that you are better prepared to enter the workforce. Because these are skills that I know I'm still developing to this day, I suspect that you are, and I suspect that all of our listeners are too. These are skills that people that are successful adults must have. That's how SEL aligns here.

JILL ANDERSON: How do you implement something like this on the ground?

ANDREW TUCKER: I think the first step is for the state to help provide some guidance here. And that guidance will be informed by the stakeholder input that you have received during your development of the portrait of a graduate. Using those stakeholders that help you to determine which competencies are most in-demand and thus should be reflected in the portrait, and how that might be implemented in an English class, or a math class, or a science class. And all the way down, it should be a PK through 12 developmental framework that states can develop. There have been numerous states that have done that.

JILL ANDERSON: Teachers are often really struggling just to handle the academic requirements that may exist in the classroom. So in some ways, does this end up feeling like another thing they have to figure out how to do in the classroom?

ANDREW TUCKER: I think that's a reality with any innovation, with any new initiative. 
And I think that with strong professional development that must come along with this, through helping administrators to understand it and understand why it's important that we really do prepare students not just for those exit exams, not just to earn those credits, but instead to truly be prepared for post-secondary education and career-- when we really do focus on what career and college-readiness is, I think that people begin to recognize that their role is not only to prepare students for that next step-- that oftentimes is college-- but also to prepare them with the skills that they need for life.

I think the other thing that's so vital to understand here is that teachers are already doing most of this. It's as simple as making it explicit. Today, we're going to work on collaboration. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to do this group project. And then you just reflect back on it. You have students reflect back on what it is that they did, and how they collaborated, and why they were good at it, and what skills they might need to still learn. Is it adding an extra element? Yes-- well, maybe. It doesn't have to be. Some teachers already do that. But for many, it would just be adding that extra element of building in that reflection on how I am developing these skills that are so vital for my future as reflected in the Portrait of a Graduate.

JILL ANDERSON: As you were talking about some of the skills and what they may be, I kept thinking to myself, well, aren't teachers already probably doing this? Because it seemed like something maybe natural in a lot of circumstances.

ANDREW TUCKER: It is because we all use these skills every single day. I mean, we all need to be collaborative. We collaborate every single day. You and I are collaborating as we talk on this podcast today. I do it every day in my day-to-day life, and you probably do too.

We all have to be critical thinkers in our professional lives. We all have to communicate. We all have to have self-management skills, et cetera. So yes, it is natural. This is a normal part of education. It's just we might not think of it explicitly. But if we can make it explicit, it does two things. One, it helps students reflect on the skills that they are developing and helps them to really add some additional focus there. And it also builds relevance into education. What do we hear from students all the time? We hear from students all the time, when am I ever going to use this? Well, if we help them understand that we are doing this for a reason, and we reflect back on it-- it's in order to help them develop skills-- then we build that relevance, and we help them understand why this is important.

JILL ANDERSON: What are some of the roadblocks that schools run into once they try to adopt this?

ANDREW TUCKER: I think roadblocks that come up is-- first of all, you have those who may feel like this is an additional responsibility that they don't know how to do and don't want to do. That's unfortunate, but that's reality. I think another roadblock is if you do not maintain that stakeholder engagement. I've often said one of the reasons why we haven't done this work more explicitly over time is because most educators have been educators their entire career, and most business people have been business people their entire career. And so we don't speak the same language. Business people say we need these skills, we need you to do this. And educators are like, well, I don't know what that looks like in the business world, so I don't know how to do it. So you've got to keep that engagement together. And you've got to have people talking with each other to really understand, what is it that you're looking for? What does it mean in your context for students to have strong communication skills? Because I know what it means in the classroom, but I may not know what it looks like in the workplace.

JILL ANDERSON: But all of this is usually defined in advance when the stakeholders, and educators, and parents, and everybody gets in the room and hashes it out, which is amazing to even imagine what that might look like.

ANDREW TUCKER: In a perfect world, that is exactly what will happen.

JILL ANDERSON: Right, but is it complicated to get folks to agree on these things?

ANDREW TUCKER: Yes, and I don't think it has to be. Communication skills-- I mean, think about what you see in job postings. I mean, another reason why a lot of people have begun to do this is because they recognize the job postings are calling for-- the skills that employers are looking for these days are indeed these soft skills, indeed these durable skills.

Why? Because we're in the era of AI. And artificial intelligence is going to be taking the place of a lot of the technical skills that people need. And what's going to be left? What's going to be left are these human skills. So we have to, as a society, and as an education system, and as a broader workforce system, we have to define these things in ways that there's a common language. 
LinkedIn's global talent trends from October 2024 says specifically that 69% of US executives say they plan to prioritize hiring candidates with soft skills, particularly transferable skills that allow candidates to move nimbly across roles. And why? It's because, quote, "AI has the potential to lead to major shifts in how we hire and who we hire. As AI increasingly takes on the less complex, more repeatable tasks being done by the workforce, companies will need to hire talent who have broader, uniquely human skills," unquote. These skills that we're talking about are human skills.

JILL ANDERSON: How do you even know if something like this is working?

ANDREW TUCKER: First of all, one of the big benefits of this coming out now, and people developing these portraits of a graduate, is that it closely aligns with career-connected learning. And career-connected learning has also taken off in the past. Well, career-connected learning has been around forever, but it's really been focused on smaller portions of the school populations. Career-connected learning, where students are engaged in lots of work-based learning opportunities or other experiential learning opportunities really is the great laboratory to help students develop these skills as well. So I think that's key.

I think the other big thing that needs to come out of this movement is how you measure whether or not students are ready and whether they've actually acquired these skills. I'm not sure anybody has fully figured that out yet. Lots of folks are trying. As I mentioned earlier, there are many states that have developed these developmental milestones and developmental frameworks that show between kindergarten and second grade, communication looks like this. And in third through fifth, it looks like this all the way up.

But I think measurement is going to be the next major phase of this work because, ultimately, if this is going to be tied to graduation requirements, it will also be tied to school accountability. And if it's going to be tied to school accountability, you've got to be able to show that it's working, and you've got to be able to show that students are indeed graduating with the skills that you say you want them to graduate with.

JILL ANDERSON: And so there just hasn't been a way to completely figure out how to do that yet.

ANDREW TUCKER: It's an emerging field for sure.

JILL ANDERSON: If you're living in a state where this doesn't exist, should you do something about it?

ANDREW TUCKER: I think it's probably coming. It's coming down the pike in most places. Frankly, I think there are some states that may not adopt a Portrait of a Graduate because of local control, because many, many districts are going to do it on their own. You very well may see a greater proportion, ultimately, of districts that have adopted a Portrait of a Graduate than states solely because of local control and local decision-making that happens at the local school board level. And I think if it's something that really interests you, I do think that going to your state school board, and providing some public comment, and showing them what other states have done could yield positive results.

I think that most people understand this is good for schools, it's good for the education system in general, and ultimately, it's good for kids. Because if we do hold students accountable and we hold schools accountable for helping students to acquire the skills and competencies that are laid out within a Portrait of a Graduate, we are preparing all students, every student, each student for life success. It is an equitable practice in schools. It can drive positive outcomes for students.

[MUSIC PLAYING] 
JILL ANDERSON: Thank you so much.

ANDREW TUCKER: It's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me today.

JILL ANDERSON: Andrew Tucker is the director of policy at the Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning. He is the co-author of the report, “Portraits of a Graduate: Strengthening Career and College Readiness Through Social and Emotional Skill Development.” I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening. 

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