A Portrait of a Graduate That Reflects Community Priorities

This January, a group of first-year students at Central High School in Springfield, Massachusetts, got a break from routine. Instead of going to class, they gathered in circles to discuss their new teaming structure and advisory blocks. They talked about a field trip to a local college; about the counselor check-ins they do in advisory, helping them stay on track; about the activities that help them build relationships. They also talked about how these new structures could be improved. In each room, adults listened and took notes.

The Portrait of a Graduate

The journey to this moment began five years earlier, when Springfield School District started working on its Portrait of a Graduate. While many districts write portraits, seeking to establish a collective vision of skills and attributes that the community hopes students will develop, many portraits are written with cursory community input and then become little more than posters. Springfield’s work, however, has been unique.

Four elements have enabled Springfield’s portrait to drive creative transformation:

1. Equitable, wide-reaching community engagement
2. Focused work by cohorts of educators working together to implement the portrait
3. Public celebration of the portrait
4. Ongoing student engagement and feedback

By combining these four elements, Springfield School District has created a portrait that not only is deeply aligned with the community, but also is frequently revisited, referenced, and celebrated.

Equitable and wide-reaching community engagement

The first step in creating Springfield’s portrait was to find a way to ensure that it would reflect the voices of the community—a significant undertaking in a city of approximately 150,000. The district convened a Community Cabinet to lead the project, which included educators, family members, and leaders in the local civic, business, higher education, and religious communities. A regular question for this team was, “Who have we not heard from? How can we change that?”

Over the course of a year, more than 200 community members, 700 educators, and 50 student leaders participated in community meetings. Each meeting was grounded in a shared vision of education that serves all students. Participants would discuss the prompts during community meetings:

1. What are your hopes and dreams for young people in Springfield?
2. What skills and attributes do you think they’ll need to achieve those hopes and dreams?
3. What do you see in our schools that helps students build these skills and attributes, or that we could do differently in order to do so?

After these meetings, the team drafted the six pillars of the Springfield Portrait of a Graduate—Learn, Communicate, Thrive, Lead, Persist, and Work—based on the community meeting discussions. The portrait was designed with attention to uplifting all voices: In the Learn pillar, ”Understand the impact of systemic racism in America” is included because so many community members expressed its importance. After gathering robust community feedback on the first draft of the portrait, the team revised.

The district then held another round of meetings to discuss this question: “What should Springfield schools Keep, Start, Stop, and Change if we are going to support all students to achieve the Portrait of a Graduate?” Above all, the district wanted to learn: What can make school a place where kids want to go each morning?

The portrait was then finalized, and schools now had to move from creating the vision to implementing it in practice.

Implementing the Portrait Across Schools

In 2021, seven Springfield schools volunteered to be Portrait of a Graduate Cohort Schools, committed to ensuring that the portrait informed teaching and learning. The schools gathered regularly online and in Summer Institutes to engage in professional development and share ideas. Over the next four years, 11 additional schools joined the group.

Through this process, teachers and leaders identified a number of opportunities that respond directly to community priorities reflected in the portrait: designing project-based units, establishing primary-person programs to ensure that every student has one adult looking out for them, deepening educators’ understanding of racism and other systemic inequities, and helping students develop persistence.

One example of how schools have taken advantage of an identified opportunity is through student-led data chats that were designed to develop students’ persistence. At Dryden Elementary School, teachers recognized that persistence was a key component of the portrait, and they designed the data chats to function as quick check-ins that put power in the hands of students to identify what they are learning, where they are succeeding, and what they need to work on.

During these data chats, students refer to assessment data to ground how they are doing and what they need to work on. While students lead the conversation, teachers ask questions to help them make sense of where they are and identify next steps. Since implementing these chats, teachers report that students have become more accountable for their learning.

At Johnson Elementary, educators focused on the elements of the Thrive, Lead, and Communicate pillars that align with healthy communication skills. Teachers modeled one-on-one conversations, using healthy communication strategies, and utilized a learning walk tool that defined student engagement and accountable talk.

Ongoing student engagement and feedback

In 2022, Springfield started holding Student Summits as a way to gather students’ insights into teaching, learning, and school culture. These summits—which have been held as districtwide gatherings and also within individual schools—bring integrity to Springfield’s portrait work, a constant check on whether students are really experiencing the vision of the portrait at school.

Public Celebration of the Portrait

A central part of amplifying the community voices within the portrait has been the use of art. Three murals have been painted in the city illustrating the portrait in vivid hues, utilizing images from a 2023 citywide Portrait of a Graduate art and writing contest. Public celebrations and social media have also kept the portrait visible, along with a podcast launched in 2022 by Springfield’s communications director, Azell Cavaan.

In many of Springfield’s schools, learning looks and feels different now than it did before the portrait was created, and these shifts are a direct reflection of the community’s priorities—informed by the voices of students, families, community members, and educators working together in a responsive way over many years, with lots of space for feedback, adjustment, collaboration, and celebration.