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Ana Vasiliev
December 31, 2024

5 Portrait of a Graduate Challenges and How to Overcome Them

As workforce needs continue to shift over the next few years, it’s critical to help K-12 students develop durable skills (also known as 21st-century skills)—such as critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration, and communication. And many school districts, like Carter County Schools and Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky, Oregon Community Unit School District 220 in Illinois, and Lincoln Consolidated Schools in Michigan, have already embraced this shift and created their own durable skills framework, often called a Portrait of a Graduate. But while we all agree these skills are important in theory, it can become challenging to put teaching (and measuring) them into practice. Common durable skills challenges include inconsistencies in how durable skill development is embedded in classrooms, a lack of centralized tools, and difficulty understanding how to measure durable skills development, just to name a few. Keep reading to see how SpacesEDU can address these common challenges associated with Portrait of a Graduate and durable skills, or click on one of the challenges below to jump directly to that section.

Learn how SpacesEDU can support your Portrait of a Graduate

Durable Skills Challenges Due to a Lack of Centralized Resources

A common durable skills challenge that we often see districts face is moving their Portrait of a Graduate from a poster on the wall to effective and consistent implementation across classrooms and schools. This can cause a misalignment amongst educators, students, community members, and other stakeholders despite having a unified set of Portrait of a Graduate competencies that everyone has agreed they want students to develop. When a school district has spent time, energy, and resources building a Portrait of a graduate, the students deserve for it to be taken off the wall. However, without a way to centralize the implementation of Portrait of a Graduate, and ensure that students and educators have access to high-quality systems and tools that support easy, student-driven durable skill documentation, adoption of these frameworks can vary widely resulting in fragmented implementation and few opportunities for students to showcase their progress. The result? A Portrait of a Graduate that becomes a check-box and is just one more thing for teachers to do rather than a student-driven initiative built on meaningful documentation and the development of durable skills over time.

Where We Can Help

Our Solution: A customizable platform that unites educators, students, and families around a clear vision of student growth.

School districts can leverage our Portrait of a Graduate tools to create a custom Portfolio Template, aligned to their local Portrait of a Graduate competencies, that follows students K-12 and beyond. Districts have the option of creating multiple templates for different grade ranges, allowing for personalized language and resources to meet the needs of different groups of learners. This means districts can align their Portfolio Templates with their scope and sequence.

This centralized tool solves common durable skills challenges by ensuring students and educators share a clear understanding of their Portrait of a Graduate and have access to powerful, student-driven documentation tools and educator reports to help ensure effective implementation and durable skills development across the district.

A district Portfolio Template that shows how to set up Portrait of a Graduate portfolios for specific schools or grades with local competencies.

Challenges Teaching Durable Skills: Inconsistencies Across Classrooms

With so much on the go, asking educators to modify their teaching practice to focus on integrating durable skills (which often comes with explicit teaching), can be a big ask and met with resistance, particularly if they haven’t been given time for professional development in this area. Schools and districts often see drastic differences in how teachers approach teaching these durable skills and the number of opportunities students have to develop and showcase their growth in these areas.

Other common durable skills challenges that can occur as a result of this are lost return on time and investment, diminished morale, and a failure to effectively implement the district's Portrait of a Graduate. To ensure that teachers feel supported, confident, and actively engaged in supporting students’ development of durable skills, overcoming this hurdle is key.

Without clear guidance, a focus on the ‘why’, and the tools in place to help offset the time spent on administrative, day-to-day tasks, educators may struggle to see the value of making this shift which can lead to failed implementation, ultimately impacting your students.

Navigating change in your district? Download our change management guide to learn more.

A teacher smiling and interacting with a student in a classroom. Other students are visible in the background. The text reads, "SpacesEDU K-12 Guide to Navigating and Managing Educational Change".

Where We Can Help

Our Approach: An intuitive platform with targeted professional development that transforms complexity into confidence. We don't just provide a tool; we provide a supportive ecosystem.

As with any change, to see successful adoption you must provide stakeholders with tools, training, and resources to set them up for success. Our software is designed to help you do this by reducing time spent on common teacher workflows like providing personalized feedback and identifying gaps in skill and competency development. We do this with features like a comprehensive competency report and multimedia feedback options (think quick audio and video feedback vs. time-consuming, written feedback), and by creating learner-centered digital documentation tools, so that students take ownership of their competency documentation and reflection, freeing up your teachers time to focus on what matters most—teaching.

Along with easy-to-use tools that place durable skills documentation in your students’ hands, with SpacesEDU you and your team get access to a dedicated Partner Success Specialist, who will work with you from the get-go, helping you craft a compelling communication and change management plan, develop a comprehensive implementation plan, and provide personalized training and custom resources for your staff.

Durable Skills Roadblock: Engaging Students in Meaningful Reflection

Working in education, we all understand the value reflection plays in helping students think critically about their learning, identifying their next steps, and ultimately progressing toward developing the 21st-century skills and competencies outlined in a Portrait of a Graduate. However, without opportunities for meaningful reflection built into day-to-day learning (and this includes the tools your district uses to support learning and your Portrait of a Graduate), it can be very challenging to engage students in this exercise and they may view reflection as an abstract concept rather than a valuable part of their skill development. This lack of meaningful reflection can hinder students’ ability to recognize their growth and connect their classroom experiences to the real world. It is one of the most common durable skills challenges we see.

Where We Can Help

Our Approach: Built-in opportunities for reflection with interactive tools that transform reflection from a mundane task to a meaningful exploration of personal growth.

Once districts create their custom Portrait of a Graduate Portfolio Template and publish it, students can begin documenting evidence of how they demonstrate the durable skills in their Portrait of a Graduate. The ability to add up to ten media artifacts means that students are naturally encouraged to think critically about how to tell a story of their learning, focusing on the process of growth over a final product. One of the things that sets SpacesEDU apart, is the ability for students to reflect on the learning moments and competency development they’ve captured.

After students have added a post to their portfolio and tagged it to the associated skill, they’re encouraged to reflect on these posts in the form of comments, leveraging a variety of media types to share their reflections in the way that best suits them. By actively engaging with a platform that focuses on the process of learning over the product and has built-in reflection features, students can gain a deeper understanding of how their learning connects to real-world competencies.

A profile showcasing Vanessa Kerr's Portrait of a Graduate portfolio. It includes Portrait of a Graduate competencies along the left-hand side, feedback from her teacher, Mr. Daniels, and Vanessa's self-reflection. The main image shows Vanessa and classmates working in a science lab.

Challenge: Effectively Monitoring and Identifying Student Progress Toward Portrait of a Graduate Competencies

By far, the most common durable skills challenge that we are currently hearing from school districts across the United States is around accountability: “How do we monitor student progress toward our Portrait of a Graduate and measure its effectiveness?”

Because Portrait of a Graduate frameworks are still so new, there simply aren’t the measures or technology tools in place to support the effective monitoring and measurement of durable skills development, for teachers, schools, and districts. This lack of visibility into how students are progressing toward your Portrait of a Graduate competencies makes it challenging to identify gaps in durable skills development for individual students, by grade, and across schools and districts. It also limits educators’ ability to provide timely and meaningful feedback, and a district’s ability to measure the overall success of its Portrait of a Graduate and student future-readiness and refine its strategies for implementation. If we can't measure the growth of students' durable skill development, how are districts able to understand if students are future-ready? How can they refine their strategies for stronger implementation?

Where We Can Help

Our Analytics Advantage: Real-time insights that turn abstract skills into concrete pathways, empowering educators with actionable data.

To monitor student progress toward durable skills development and the effectiveness of your Portrait of a Graduate, you need access to tools that will help you do this. Our Portfolio Templates come with analytics and reporting features to help make this process easier. At the teacher and school levels, educators have access to a powerful Competency Report, allowing them to see student progress toward durable skills development for individual students, across all students in their school or grade ranges set at the district level for that Portfolio Template. This makes it easy to identify gaps in competency development and pinpoint what durable skills need more attention moving forward. At the school district level, administrators have access to robust analytics and reporting through PowerBI, that showcases how students are tracking towards each competency, broken down by school and grade level, as well as educator engagement metrics. These tools ensure that all stakeholders have the insights needed to support student growth effectively.

A dashboard displaying three bar charts: "Proficiency by Competency," "Growth over Time," and "Proficiency by Grade." Each chart has levels 1 to 4 represented in different shades of blue, showing varying percentages.

Roadblock: Limited Opportunities to Showcase Authentic Student Achievements with Multiple Parties

Learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom. A lot of skill development occurs outside these four walls through work-based learning, CTE, service-based learning, and extracurriculars. Often these learning moments (and the durable skills students are working to develop) can go unnoticed by their teachers, peers, families, and the broader community. Not only is this a missed opportunity to have every learner highlight their unique strengths and accomplishments regardless of their ability, but it can weaken the connection, trust, and engagement between schools and their stakeholders.

Where We Can Help

Community Connection: We turn portfolios into dynamic narratives, bridging the gap between students, educators, families, and community stakeholders.

With SpacesEDU, students (along with families and educators) get access to a dedicated app, meaning your learners can capture and share their skill development and learning moments anytime, anywhere. After uploading evidence of learning to their Portfolio and tagging it with the competencies aligned in your Portrait of a Graduate, your students can share their accomplishments in two ways:

  • External View-Only Portfolio Share: Using a share URL, students can share a view-only version of their Portfolio to highlight their experience and skills externally with community members, or alongside college and job applications. This means that simply having students document learning moments K-12, can actually set them apart from others as they leave your building and enter the workforce. And because they retain access to their Portfolio post-graduation, students can easily update this living document to use for future applications.
  • Portfolio Presentation Mode (coming soon): Learners can turn their Portfolio into a presentation, quickly highlighting their accomplishments and speaking to these achievements. Perfect for things like student-led conferences and defense of learning presentations, your learners can leverage this feature to engage the broader community, speaking to the durable skills they’ve developed, aligned to your Portrait of a Graduate, while sharing evidence of that growth.

This transparency allows students to take pride in their accomplishments and ensure each learner’s unique jour

What Sets Us Apart

  • Adaptive Framework: Customization that meets your unique district vision
  • Student Empowerment: Tools that inspire ownership and accountability
  • Comprehensive Insights: Data-driven strategies for continuous improvement
  • Collaborative Ecosystem: Breaking down traditional educational silos

Durable skills aren't a distant goal—they're an immediate necessity. We provide the tools you need to effectively implement your Portrait of a Graduate, ensuring every student graduates not just with knowledge, but with the adaptive skills to thrive.

Ready to Redefine Student Potential?

Book a call and discover how SpacesEDU can turn educational challenges into opportunities for extraordinary growth.

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