At Indian Prairie Faculty District (IPSD), situated simply west of Chicago, one of many essential alignment factors—a “north star,” if you’ll—for the district’s 35 colleges is its Portrait of a Graduate profile. Broadly adopted by faculty districts throughout the nation, Portrait of a Graduate outlines the interdisciplinary expertise {that a} district believes its college students ought to embody and exemplify by highschool commencement. For IPSD, these interdisciplinary expertise are six core competencies that graduates have to succeed, whatever the path a scholar takes after graduation. These competencies embrace creativity and innovation, communication, vital pondering and problem-solving, citizenship, flexibility and adaptableness, and resilience.
Portraits Present Route
In IPSD and college districts nationwide, these Portraits of a Graduate inform the broader neighborhood what one among their graduates ought to “look” like. However within the means of speaking the values and aspirations of the district and wider neighborhood, these Portraits additionally operate to align the work of colleges and educators. Within the spirit of backward design, by conceiving what well-rounded success appears to be like like on the finish of the Ok-12 journey, these Portraits lay the muse for what the pathway itself must be.
Pathways Matter
Whereas a Portrait of a Graduate supplies an endpoint of the place districts hope college students shall be by commencement, a Ok-12 pathway is vital to supporting college students to turn out to be the graduates that faculty leaders envision them changing into. Working in collaboration with districts, together with IPSD, Digital Promise has discovered the simplest studying pathways are cross-curricular and provided persistently throughout a district’s colleges and inside their school rooms relatively than remoted at a couple of magnet colleges or restricted to a couple course electives. This problem of a considerable and equitable schooling pathway is probably no extra urgent than in pc science (CS) as a self-discipline and profession, each of which stay areas the place people experience marginalization and exclusion from the earliest ages. One results of this exclusion is youngsters having inequitable entry to constant, high-quality computing alternatives.
At Digital Promise, we see district-level possession in pc science and, extra extensively, computational pondering (CT) as a vital initiative for all faculty districts. To this point, all 50 U.S. states have CS requirements in place, however the variety of districts inside every state truly enacting such requirements presents a much more blurry image, inconsistent throughout colleges and barely cumulatively constructing to rising scholar competence.
For the previous 5 years (2017-2022), Digital Promise has labored with eight totally different faculty districts throughout eight totally different states designing their very own Ok-12 Computational Pondering Pathways. One consequence has been Digital Promise’s district-facing CT Pathways Toolkit, in addition to a lately launched free and on-demand on-line course Developing District-Wide Inclusive Computational Thinking Pathways, hosted on the Infosys Pathfinders On-line Institute.
IPSD was one of many first districts to accomplice with Digital Promise within the CT Pathways efforts. Its Portrait of a Graduate profile has been instrumental in making certain CT just isn’t handled as an erudite tech ability meant for a choose few however a basic ability for all of its college students and a veritable signpost for a profile of its graduates. Brian Giovanni, IPSD’s director of innovation and the district’s lead on the CT Pathways undertaking, factors out that IPSD’s Portrait of a Graduate and its CT Pathways work have at all times been complementary initiatives. “Our district Portrait helps our intentionality. Integrating components of POG [Portrait of a Graduate], akin to ‘creativity and innovation’ and ‘vital pondering,’ genuinely synch with the talents of IPSD’S CT Pathway, akin to ‘creating computational artifacts’ and ‘decomposition.’ It wasn’t yet another factor for academics to do. It was one other means to enact the Portrait itself.”