A Promise to Students
At its heart, creating and operationalizing a Graduate Profile fulfills a promise to students to assure that they are well-prepared for future success. It also satisfies an expectation of the community that their young people will be ready to take on critical roles in order to advance social, political, and economic stability and growth. For educators, it represents a district transformation strategy that takes years. For all, if done well, it fulfills an obligation to work earnestly toward dismantling persistent structural inequities that have disproportionately disadvantaged Black, Indigenous, and other students of color (BIPOC).
Five Cs
This Blueprint maps out several interdependent phases of work necessary to realize the power and potential of a graduate profile to transform education resulting in a whole child approach that more equitably and holistically prepares young people for future sucess.
- Coherent vision
- Communication strategy
- Culture & Conditions to enable progress
- Capacity to advance
- Continuous improvement
Change Takes Time
A Graduate Profile sets forth a bold vision. Making the Graduate Profile live and breath requires a deep investment by all staff and community stakeholders over an extended period of time.
Below is an approximate timeline for the interdependent phases of implementation.
Assuring Coherence
It can be daunting to think about a long trajectory of continuous improvement in order to achieve a desired outcome. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a picture of what it looks like when a Graduate Profile is fully operationalized. While there are several schools and districts, even states, that have moved along the journey and can share illustrative videos, case studies, and artifacts, no district in the U.S. (that we are aware of) can profess to “being done.” That said, Appendix A captures a bulleted list of what full operationalization might look like. It’s a picture of a future state.
If the outcomes articulated in the Graduate Profile truly reflect a “North Star” that guides the district, then rather than thinking about its realization as “one more thing,” it becomes the organizing structure into which most other initiatives and programs are folded to assure alignment and coherence.
While all five phases are essential, “capacity to advance” constitutes the lion’s share of the investment in terms of time and resources. For that reason, the largest section of this Blueprint is dedicated to that phase.
