One skill Kentucky students learn in elementary school is how to write an opinion backed up by reasons and details. So in the Bullitt County school district, south of Louisville, the 1st grade classes at Old Mill Elementary School last January approached opinion writing and related skills in a way that showed their potential to have a real community impact.
The four classes learned about the workings of the Kentucky Humane Society in Louisville and browsed the shelter’s website to familiarize themselves with the dogs, cats, and horses up for adoption. Then, they chose their favorite animal and had the job of writing short plugs explaining why the pet should be adopted. The students recorded themselves reading what they’d written, incorporated the audio into an animated class presentation, and shared it with the shelter.
The students were satisfying Kentucky academic standards for 1st grade. But the project was also an example of the 13,000-student district’s attempt to go beyond standards and equip students—even some of its youngest—with more general life skills, like collaboration, problem-solving, and communication, that community members and employers consistently say they want from students coming out of high school.
Preparing Students for What’s Next
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Bullitt County educators are hoping students emerge from 13 years of school with these skills in part through more project- and community-based learning like the Humane Society collaboration.
“We know content’s important. We know standards are important. We know that there are certain things that are foundational, that students have to know and be able to do,” said Jesse Bacon, the Bullitt County superintendent. “But outside of that, what else do students need in order to be successful?”
That question is at the heart of a comprehensive rethinking that’s underway about how schools are set up, how students learn, what skills they’re expected to acquire, and how they demonstrate what they’ve learned. Much of this work directly challenges the traditional concept of school as a place where students simply acquire knowledge, by asking them to take the next step and apply it in a real-world context. It’s a big departure that’s unlikely to happen quickly.
But the deliberate focus on universal workforce skills—often called durable, non-cognitive, soft, or transferable skills—is starting to take root as school districts and states develop so-called portraits of a graduate that lay out in graphical form the characteristics communities hope their students develop by the time they complete high school.
A network of education-focused nonprofit organizations are supporting this transition. But they concede they’re doing this work without research to guide them on what’s most effective.
And while a general consensus has emerged on the broader life skills community members want students to acquire—critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills commonly appear in these portraits of a graduate—there’s similarly little research confirming which abilities actually set up students for the best chance of success in life.
“There’s some strong intuition there, but I think it is resting a lot on that intuition,” said Matt Chingos, the vice president of education data and policy at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization that’s leading an effort called the Student Upward Mobility Initiative to fund academic research aimed at determining the skills students need to achieve economic success in life.
In addition to research, parallel efforts are underway to develop gauges that teachers and schools can use to judge whether students have acquired these skills.
Portraits of a graduate as an answer to, ‘why are we learning this?’
To be sure, the drive to identify and inculcate these kinds of skills stretches back decades in American education, from the “life adjustment” movement of the mid-20th century through the push, in the early 2000s, for “21st century skills,” all emphasizing many of the same basic ideas: collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.
Some of those former efforts, aimed mainly at non-college goers, smacked of classism. And experts have debated at length the extent to which critical thinking skills taught in one context can be transferred to another.
Still, the efforts today reflect a continued sense that schools haven’t emphasized these skills enough. And although the end goal is to have students fluent in these skills by the end of high school, laying the foundation goes back to the early grades—like the 1st grade classrooms at Bullitt County’s Old Mill Elementary.
In Bullitt County, the district’s graduate profile was the result of strategic planning begun in 2017 that involved focus groups and community meetings with students, teachers, parents, residents, business leaders, and other community members.
Students were asked what they hoped to gain from their school experience and what they wanted to accomplish. Employers were asked what they looked for in prospective hires. Parents were asked what experiences they hoped their children would have in school, and what they hoped they would gain from them, Bacon said.
We know content’s important. We know standards are important. We know that there are certain things that are foundational, that students have to know and be able to do. But outside of that, what else do students need in order to be successful?
The groups differed in their word choices, but they voiced consistent themes, he said.
From that process, the district developed its graduate profile, which lays out the broad characteristics, or competencies, Bullitt County students should develop by the time they graduate. The profile says they should be effective communicators, innovative problem solvers, productive collaborators, self-directed navigators, community contributors, and mastery learners.
To incorporate those competencies into instruction, educators then worked to define what it meant for students to display each one, and how it looked at different grade levels.
The district now emphasizes what it calls authentic learning experiences, like the Humane Society opinion-writing undertaking, that tend to include hands-on projects driven largely by students that might directly address a community need.
“We’ve focused for so long in the education space around the acquisition of content and knowledge when, today, our kids have more access to content and information than ever before, and that’s not going to slow down,” Bacon said. “And so it’s not enough now to have knowledge of facts or material or information or content or standards. You have to know how to be able to apply those things in truly authentic ways.”
In addition to fulfilling academic standards, each authentic learning experience addresses at least one of the six competencies outlined in the graduate profile, assistant superintendent Adrienne Usher said. Throughout the project, the teacher discusses that competency and how the lesson relates to it, and students reflect on what they learned.
The Humane Society project, for example, addressed the district’s “effective communicator” and “community contributor” competencies, said Ashley Byerley, an instructional coach who worked with Old Mill Elementary’s 1st grade teachers on it.
While individual districts and states have independently developed their portraits of a graduate, the final products have had striking similarities. Virtually all of them emphasize that students should emerge from school as critical thinkers, problem solvers, collaborators, self-starters, and community-minded citizens.
“It doesn’t matter, really, where you’re growing up, where your community is located,” Bacon said. “There are foundational, core things that are part of the human development process that we have to foster and nurture as a part of the responsibility to educate kids and prepare them to be productive contributors to our world and society.”
At a time when artificial intelligence is burgeoning and can perform many tasks that previously required humans, the skills that portraits of a graduate identify are “so much about being human and leveraging these technologies and these supports, but being able to engage with each other and ourselves in very complex ways,” said Brooke Stafford-Brizard, vice president for innovation and impact at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which is working to develop assessments that measure students’ progress toward mastering these broader competencies.
In Utah, education officials held more than 40 focus groups with different constituencies across the state and administered surveys to inform their development of a state-level portrait of a graduate. At the same time, the state board of education encouraged local districts to develop their own, expecting it would contribute to a consensus on what schools should prioritize beyond standardized test-oriented accountability metrics, said Sarah Young, the chief of staff to Utah’s state superintendent.
“We really felt strongly that most folks were going to arrive at a pretty similar outcome,” Young said.
Beyond simply developing the portrait of a graduate—which Young called the “North Star of education” for the state—Utah officials broke out the competencies it outlines by grade range to show what students should be able to do as they progress through school and develop the skills.
Simply determining the outcomes, Young said, “doesn’t necessarily tell a 3rd grade teacher, so how do I contribute to that vision?”
In Utah’s Juab district, the portrait of a graduate offers teachers some help in answering the age-old question: “When am I going to ever use this in real life?” said Natalie Darrington, an instructional coach in the 2,700-student system south of Provo that was one of the first in the state to develop a portrait of a graduate.
Students might never use some of the specific knowledge they learn in math class outside of school, Darrington said. But learning it contributes to something bigger—becoming a mathematical thinker and problem-solver—that corresponds with the broader skills in the portrait of a graduate, she said.
“It’s not about the content,” Darrington said. “It’s about all of these other things that you’re developing about yourself that you’re going to be able to build on and carry and transfer to your English class or transfer to your science class.”
How will schools know if they’re successfully imparting durable skills?
The mechanisms for testing students’ understanding of math, reading, and other academic subjects are, if still hotly debated, well established.
But if the new “North Star” for schools is—in addition to rigorous academics—training students to become critical thinkers, collaborators, and problem solvers, how will they know if they’ve succeeded?
It’s a question to which some of the nation’s largest test developers are devoting attention.
The textbook publisher and test-maker Pearson has published a series of papers in recent years on teaching and assessing creativity, communication, critical thinking, and collaboration. The company also works with employers on cultivating “power skills” among workers.
And last year, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching announced a collaboration with test-maker ETS, the former administrator of the SAT and developer of other major national tests like the GRE, to build assessment tools that measure precisely those skills states and districts are outlining in their portraits of a graduate.
“I think there’s never been more attention on these kinds of skills, and I’ve never seen the policy priority at a higher level,” said Chris Domaleski, associate director of the Center for Assessment, which works with state education departments on assessment and accountability systems.
But direct measures of students’ mastery of durable skills are still nascent, Domaleski said, and not something states are yet incorporating into the performance measures to which they hold schools accountable.
The Carnegie-ETS initiative is in its early stages, but the idea is to build tools that provide the same psychometric reliability as traditional academic tests while giving timely feedback to students and teachers. Students would submit projects and work products from outside learning experiences, such as internships and job shadows, and participate in gamified or experiential assessment modules, according to the Carnegie Foundation. That could happen at any time, rather than during a prescribed testing window.
“So it ends up being a very dynamic and robust picture of how to continue to support the student,” said Stafford-Brizard, the Carnegie vice president.
The high school transcript is another facet of K-12 education that could evolve.
The Mastery Transcript Consortium, which became an ETS subsidiary in May, has worked for years on a digital academic record through which students show how they’ve developed the competencies their districts prioritize in their portraits of a graduate.
The transcript lays out those competencies, and students supply evidence showing their progress—projects they’ve completed, internships, tournaments where they’ve competed. It doesn’t list grades.
Some 370 schools have joined the consortium, and nearly 500 colleges and universities have accepted students supplying the transcript since 2020, according to the group.
The transcript and competency-based assessments could help build currency for the model more widely, beyond the small number of school systems trying to make this shift, said Mike Flanagan, the Mastery Transcript Consortium’s CEO. So far, it’s been difficult for schools to implement because it’s so far outside the traditional K-12 infrastructure and largely unknown.
“We have to take these skills and make them legible in a way that they are not today, and also make them super easy to read and use,” he said, “so the people who have to make tough decisions about who goes where and does what have the best and most accurate information.”
