Graduate Profiles in Action

In 2011, at Savannah High School on AUHSD’s west side, teachers and school leaders frustrated by test-focused instruction initiated a community-wide process to redefine student success in the district. This evolved years later to the district-wide adoption of the “5 Cs” (Graduate Profile). Today, the district’s Career Preparedness Systems Framework and its 5 Cs are deeply embedded in classroom practice in several ways, with a particular focus on cultivating student voice.

In 2013, Dr. David Miyashiro became superintendent of CVUSD and began the district on a journey of profound change. Based on feedback from the community that educators seemed to discredit skilled-trade jobs and professions that did not require a college degree, Dr. Miyashiro championed the creation of “The World of Work,” a K-8 curriculum that helps students learn their strengths, interests and values, and how those might apply to different careers. This paved the way for the development, approval, and implementation of the district’s Portrait of a Graduate in 2021.

In 2014, following a listening tour by two district leaders, VUSD launched a new “strengths-based” approach that emphasized personal relationships, student voice and choice, and connections to the world of work. This shift led to positive change across the district and spurred the development and adoption of the district’s “Framework for the Future” in 2022, which includes not only a Learner Portrait, but also an Adult Portrait, and System Portrait to guide fundamental change at all levels. To avoid the Learner Portrait becoming “an additional thing” put on teachers’ plates, VUSD leaders asked each school to decide how their “unique brand” supports the Learner Portrait, and to build on what they were already doing to deepen the work. To deepen this work, VUSD has become one of just a handful of CA districts in recent years to adopt competency-based learning, which is linked directly to their Learner Portrait.

DJUSD began the process of developing a Graduate Profile in the fall of 2017, driven by a desire to clarify the district’s priorities and better define the purpose of education. Following outreach and engagement with well over 1,000 people across the community, the district developed a Graduate Profile to create a vision for the future of education in the district aligned with what teachers identified as the most teachable and assessable competencies. The district’s schools are now embarking on the journey of aligning practice with the Graduate Profile.

LUSD’s transformation began 15 years ago, when the district was seeing dismal results. In 2007, the district engaged the community to create and adopt the LUSD Strategic Design, an ambitious and all-encompassing framework that not only expressed the community’s values around curriculum, instruction, assessment, and more, but also redefined success to include a set of Lifelong Learning Standards. Still today, the Strategic Design guides the ongoing transformation of the learner experience. LUSD’s approach has evolved to become a national model for competency-based education, driven by a whole-person definition of success.