his blog post is the first 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.

The concept of a Portrait of a Graduate (PoG) is well-known across the country, with many schools and districts having completed the work to identify a specific set of skills that will equip their learners with what they need to thrive in their lives beyond the walls of school. It is an exciting shift for public education—the acknowledgement that the very purpose of school must be different if we are to prepare young people for today and tomorrow’s world. The Portrait of a Graduate invites us to declare a new center of what school is all about, where complex cognitive and social-emotional skills like collaboration, global perspective, critical thinking, self-direction, communication, and empathy are the core curriculum, with rich academic content serving as the vehicle by which learners practice and deepen their understanding of these skills. This presents a real opportunity for schools to increase relevance for all learners, as they can chart their own growth in skills that they will use for a lifetime, rather than just one academic year.

However, education is a complex system, with competing demands, inconsistent resources, and historical and sociopolitical forces pushing and pulling on all sides. Thus, change is hard. And, like many new ideas that have come before it, the Portrait of the Graduate can easily become the next thing to sweep into a school or district, but have very little actual impact on the experience of learners. In fact, there is some early evidence that this is the case for many systems that may have a poster of their Portrait on the wall, but few signs of impact. Two years ago, in a conversation about the move to scrap the Carnegie Unit, Tim Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation, said, 

One of the [trends] in the educational system at the moment are these things called portraits of a graduate or portraits of learners. They’re everywhere. One of the things we did with ETS was look carefully at all the ones that we could. They’re interesting because they represent an American consensus about what the purpose of schooling is. They are really focused on skills. Often, they’ve been developed with lots of parent voice and teacher voice and student voice. Red and blue, left and right, communities, in spite of all our polarized hype, are saying there are a set of things that we want for young people. That should make us optimistic if we can leverage that. 

The other things that you will hear is, A) they haven’t really made a big difference, and B) we have no way of measuring the things in them. 

The Portrait of a Graduate has the potential to be so much more than a trend. But for a PoG to last and actually transform the educational experience for all learners, we must identify and support multiple and varied levers of deeper implementation. For the Portrait to truly sit at the center of a school/district, all members of the learning community must embrace and take on the work of teaching, learning, practicing, and reflecting on the PoG skills. 

One place that is making great strides in building its system around the PoG is Norwalk Public Schools (NPS) in Norwalk, Connecticut. This commitment to system-wide transformation is essential for NPS, a diverse and urban school district in Connecticut that serves around 11,500 students. Committed to providing an excellent and equitable education so all students graduate future-ready, NPS must address the needs of its highly varied community. Twenty-two percent of its student population are multilingual learners, and NPS families speak 53 different languages, representing many countries from around the world. To serve this diverse population and ensure all students develop the skills needed to thrive in our ever-changing world, NPS created a multi-year Portrait of a Graduate implementation plan.

The Norwalk Story, Part 1: The PoG System 

From its inception, the NPS’ Portrait of a Graduate was designed as a systems-level initiative. Rather than living within a single department, the Portrait of a Graduate was intended to be achieved only through true cross-collaboration across the entire district. The goal was not to simply define a set of competencies, but to create coherence across the district in service of supporting all students becoming future ready. 

This vision required a different approach from the start. In many districts, Portrait of a Graduate work is housed within the curriculum department or led by an assistant superintendent alongside many other responsibilities. In Norwalk, the district made a deliberate structural choice to place the development and implementation of the Portrait of a Graduate with a Harvard Strategic Data Project Fellow. The intent was to ensure focused time, cross-department coordination, and sustained attention to design and implementation. This role was charged with collaborating across departments, rather than owning the work in isolation. 

This approach surfaced an early and important tension. When everyone owns the work, it can sometimes feel like no one owns it. The Portrait of a Graduate became the district’s first major initiative that truly required cross-department collaboration at scale. While this aligned with the superintendent’s long-standing vision, it also meant paving a new road for how the district worked together. Departments needed clarity around how their work connected to the Portrait of a Graduate and what success would look like within their specific context. 

To address this, Norwalk focused on building systems before jumping to tools. Early on, there was a strong pull to move directly to assessing the Portrait of a Graduate. However, district leaders paused to ask a more foundational question: if the Portrait of a Graduate were truly alive in the system, what opportunities would students be experiencing on a daily basis to develop these competencies? This shift led the district to examine existing systems and structures to determine whether they were creating enough high-quality opportunities for students to engage in the Portrait of a Graduate competencies. 

A phased implementation strategy became a key systems lever for NPS. NPS strategically launched one competency per year, starting with the critical thinker competency in the 2024-25 school year. Based on the rollout of this first competency, Norwalk adopted a Portrait of a Graduate Competency Launch Framework that provided the system with a blueprint for the rollout of future competencies. In the 2025-26 school year, NPS is launching its second competency, the effective communicator, using this launch framework. 

With each year of implementation, NPS continues to take a systems-level approach to the Portrait of a Graduate. Board goals across multiple assistant superintendents explicitly reference and align to the Portrait of a Graduate, reinforcing its role as a districtwide priority. The Portrait of a Graduate also serves as a central strand of professional learning for school leaders. As a result, most schools have School Improvement Plans aligned with the Portrait of a Graduate, and educators across the district have selected professional growth goals aligned with its competencies. This consistent focus across levels of the organization reinforces that the Portrait of a Graduate is a shared responsibility, not the work of any single department or role.

Norwalk’s systems-level work continues. As the district prepares to develop its next strategic plan, the Portrait of a Graduate will serve as a foundational anchor for NPS’s future. Upcoming competencies will be introduced through the same phased, reflective approach, with continued attention to how systems across the organization support students in becoming future ready. By centering systems-level thinking and treating the Portrait of a Graduate as a shared responsibility, Norwalk is using it to create greater coherence across the district in service of all students.

In the next six blog posts, you will be able to follow along as NPS continues to build upon this system-wide foundation of the PoG. We will share lessons and learnings that have emerged so far, as well as tools and strategies for PoG implementation.