This blog post is the second in a series documenting Norwalk Public Schools’ journey to create, implement and be formed by a living Portrait of a Graduate.  Abby & Kimberly met through a PoG workshop in May of 2025, and are documenting how their intersecting work is supporting the PoG coming to life in Norwalk.

Levers for Deeper Implementation (Abby)

Having spent the last decade walking alongside brilliant educators working to bring their PoG’s to life, I have witnessed schools and districts grappling with the creation of the PoG – the skills a system lands on and the process they take to get there, as well as the centering of the PoG – doing the work of deep implementation so that the skills are intentionally ubiquitous.  So, as I listened to my clients and studied PoG work across the country, I have identified several levers that have proven to help schools/districts push past the surface-level implementation of a PoG. Some of these are things I learned in my early PoG work with amazing colleagues at Envision Learning Partners and have iterated upon, and some I have developed more recently as I continue to learn/think alongside others doing this work. I shared some of these levers in a workshop for the CT Principals’ Association last spring, which is where I met Kimberly and the Norwalk team for the first time.

These 4 Levers of Implementation are shifts that any school or district can take on as they work to bring a PoG off the wall and into the daily lived experiences of students and teachers. 

1. Building/Deepening a Culture of Reflection: It is impossible for the PoG to be truly meaningful for all without a culture of reflection. Embedding regular, varied, and authentic reflective practices into the regularly scheduled model for every learner (adults & students) is vital for a PoG system. It is the necessary slowing down that allows us all to make meaning of what we are doing and what we are learning. The reflection is where the skills become visible & meaningful to the learner.
2. Explicit Instruction of the PoG Skills as Part of Your Core Curriculum: We cannot assume that learners inherently know how to “do” the skills of the PoG. If we have a high-quality PoG, then the skills we have selected are complex, transferable across all areas of life, and have a lifelong learning evolution. Thus, they should be able to be worked into any and all classes across a school. Learners need to understand the skills in the same way they need to understand content. This requires explicit instruction, multiple opportunities to practice and receive feedback, and the chance to chart growth.
3. Making PoG Skill Demonstration Public: A PoG system needs to think differently when it comes to measuring learner growth and performance. A system that is centered around a PoG is able to confidently say that all of their learners are developing the skills AND can point to evidence of that. Asking learners to demonstrate their understanding of and growth in the VoG skills requires different forms (and mental models) of assessment/ measurement. Making their learning more public and visible allows us to move toward celebration of individualized learner growth rather than sorting/tracking humans.
4. Parallel Pedagogy: Centering the PoG applies to everyone in your system.  We are all learners of the PoG. The implementation of a PoG can often falter when the adult learning is not attended to alongside the student learning. The PoG skills should not just be for the students. Which means that the adults in the system will need their own type of supported learning, opportunities to practice and receive feedback, reflection time, public demonstrations of growth, etc. The PoG allows everyone to travel in the same direction.

These 4 Levers are meant to provide different access points for a school or district to say, “let’s start here… and try something.” They are not a perfect solution, of course, because of the unique and complex nature of every school or district. But the hope is that the levers are exactly that – they can increase the power of PoG work because they can amplify and/or focus the effort around PoG implementation in impactful ways. For NPS, these levers are providing a way to get unstuck. By the end of the first year of implementation, the district recognized it had reached a stalling point. While the Portrait of a Graduate had been introduced, it was not yet fully alive within the system.

The NPS Approach to Implementation (Abby and Kimberly)

NPS launched one competency per year, beginning with critical thinking. Over the course of the year, teachers increasingly planned learning opportunities intended to support learners in thinking critically. However, a gap emerged between planning and practice. In many cases, opportunities designed to be high-rigor did not result in students actually engaging in critical thinking. Tasks were often over-scaffolded, unintentionally reducing the cognitive demand for students.  

At the same time, curriculum units had been tagged to identify where critical thinking opportunities existed. While this initially brought clarity, it also raised new questions. Teachers and leaders began to wonder whether critical thinking was becoming a check-the-box exercise. Did it only live in one task or one moment within a unit, rather than being embedded throughout instruction?

Student feedback reinforced these concerns. Findings from fall and spring student focus groups showed that while students felt they were given opportunities to think critically, many did not realize that the district was intentionally supporting them in developing this skill. Students were not yet making the connection between their learning experiences and the Portrait of a Graduate. For example, one elementary school student shared that they needed to think critically in all subjects. Yet the same student reported never having heard of the Portrait of a Graduate and only vaguely remembered their parent receiving a flyer about it and being confused about what it was. Taken together, these insights made it clear that NPS needed to take a different approach to move the work forward in a way that was more visible and meaningful for students. 

NPS is using the four levers to design tools and structures that are helping to move its Portrait of a Graduate work forward. This work is ongoing, and the district continues to learn in real time how to apply the levers in ways that create meaningful, system-level impact for students.

In the blog posts to come, we will dive more deeply into the 4 Levers to unpack what they are, how you might try one out, and what impact each can have on PoG implementation efforts. Each blog will highlight the story of how NPS is using these levers in practice and provide practical strategies for implementing them across contexts. Join us as we explore how to implement a Portrait of a Graduate as a framework to learn, teach, and lead.