Key Points
Back to top- In a changing world, it’s hard to know what students will need for success after graduation.
- More and more, districts and schools are turning to the Portrait of a Graduate—a vision statement about the skills, mindsets, or attitudes students should graduate with—to help equip their students for future success.
- CASEL scanned over 270 of these Portrait of a Graduate documents at the district level and asked: What do they have in common? What do they look like? Learn more about the results.
Jared will be graduating from high school in a few months. He’s got a flair for math, so he naturally gets straight A’s in that area. He’s planning on college and thinking about a career in STEM. The future is bright, right?
Maybe, but maybe not. There are a few more things to know about Jared. In areas where he doesn’t have a natural gift, he doesn’t do as well. He thinks history is “boring,” because he doesn’t see how it’s relevant to him. When things get hard, he tends to give up. And while he excels when working on his own, his work on group projects is less than stellar, and most students don’t want to get assigned with him.
Do you think he’s ready for his future? Once he’s done with his academic career, will he be prepared to pursue the opportunities life offers? Employers may be clamoring to hire him based on academics, but will they be just as eager to keep him around when they see how he works on a team, overcomes obstacles, and manages his time and emotions?
What Do We Want for our Graduating Seniors?
Back to topThese are the kinds of questions districts, schools, and states are raising. In a world of test scores and GPAs, they’re asking: What else do we want for our students? What skills will they need after graduation?
To answer it, many are using a tool called the Portrait of a Graduate. It’s essentially a vision statement (or a series of statements) that outlines what are the skills, mindsets, or attitudes that the school, the district, or the state wants to see from their graduates at the end of their education journey. Sometimes it’s a document; other times, it’s a poster or other visual representation of what that graduate will look like.
Academic achievement is there, of course, but the Portrait includes so much more: the sum total of what students need to be effective, fulfilled, and successful in all aspects of their lives. That means career, relationships, personal fulfillment and well-being, civic engagement, and much more.
What’s Included in a Portrait of a Graduate?
Back to topWhile we’ve seen many examples of Portraits, we wanted to get a better sense of how this increasingly popular tool is being used across the United States education system. So we scanned over 270 of these Portrait of a Graduate documents at the district level and asked: What do they have in common? What do they look like? Then we wrote a report with our findings.
What we found was that every single Portrait we looked at mentioned at least one competency that falls under CASEL’s five core social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies. The vast majority include multiple of these competencies as well as those connected to career and workforce readiness and development. And these skills appear alongside academic and technical competencies; they are not separable. They’re in it together.
More findings: The top terms we see across these Portraits align really well with what we’re finding in studies of what employers are asking for: communication, adaptability (which was the top skill in LinkedIn’s top skills list of 2024), reflection, respect, and critical thinking. Those are the skills that districts are prioritizing, and even though the Portraits are at the visioning stage, they already tell us important things about the more holistic and multivalenced vision of what we want when we say “student success.”
Putting the Portraits Into Practice
Back to topThe challenge is, then, how we implement these Portraits. How do we bring these to life and use them to change the day-to-day experiences of students in the classroom and the school? A number of districts have already started to take steps in this direction, and we can learn from those models and bright spots.
At the state level, for example, Virginia has connected their Portrait of a Graduate to their content area standards. That’s a powerful model: connecting the Portrait with other policies or priorities is a great way to energize your portrait and get more support to bring it to life.
Some districts embed instructional practices with their portrait competencies. Others include supplemental documents like a Portrait of an Educator or a Portrait of a School System, which is a critical recognition that you can’t just expect students to develop these competencies on their own right. What systemic supports do they need across the school, the district, and how do we support educators in developing those skills and competencies themselves so that they can model them for students and scaffold student development?
SEL and the Portrait of a Graduate
Back to topThis is an area where the field of SEL can really be recruited to support these efforts. The SEL field is decades-old and has validated measurement tools and assessment tools has implementation guidance. How do we make sure implementation is done with fidelity and in a high-quality way as opposed to a surface-level integration.
These are just a few of the findings we uncovered in our study. To learn more, read the full report:
Related Posts
- How Can States Prepare Students for the Future? The “Portrait of the Graduate” Helps Set the Vision
- National SEL Week 2026 Capitol Hill Briefing: SEL & Future Readiness
- State of the SEL Field 2026: Human Skills for a Changing World
Write for Us
Back to topAre you interested in writing for CASEL’s blog, Constellations? Learn more about what we’re looking for and how to pitch your idea!