What skills do NC’s students need? New ‘Portrait of a Graduate’ aims to give answers.
North Carolina high school students need to learn skills such as empathy, critical thinking and collaboration to be successful after graduation, according to a new report released Tuesday.
The “Portrait of a Graduate” identified seven skills and mindsets that state education leaders say will help give high school students the broadest possible opportunities after graduation.
The skills are adaptability, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, empathy, a learner’s mindset and personal responsibility.
“Our hope is that schools will embrace this portrait and that schools and teachers will emphasize these competencies in their day-to-day work,” said State Superintendent Catherine Truitt.
Truitt said the state needed to identify this Portrait of a Graduate because only 31% of high school seniors are getting any kind of workforce credential by the time they turn 24. Truitt has called 2022 the “Year of the Workforce.”
The state Department of Public Instruction began the initiative in March. More than 1,200 North Carolinians worked on the project, helping to whittle down a list that at one point included 50 different skills.
Elizabeth Santamour, a Hoke County middle school teacher and 2022 finalist for North Carolina Teacher of the Year, helped create the portrait. She said they’re not fully educating students unless they’re teaching them the seven skills.
“Just like students come with different varying levels of math skills and literacy skills, they come with different levels of empathy, different levels of communication skills,” Santamour said at Tuesday’s presentation. “If we’re talking about it and planning for it, then we can build these skills instead of making the assumption that they walk into the room having it.”
Truitt is hoping the new portrait will help change how the state evaluates schools so it all doesn’t come down to standardized testing.
‘Learning something new’
High school students were among the people who helped create the new portrait.
Marcela Villasuso Venegas, a junior at Clayton High School and student adviser to the State Board of Education, said that having a learner’s mindset was the skill she considered to be the most important. She said that if you’re closed to learning new things then the other competencies go out the window.
“From the moment you’re born to the very end, you’re always learning something new,” Venegas said. “You’re never at a moment in your life where you know all.”
But Venegas said it’s also important that empathy be part of the school experience. She said that it’s hard to learn when everyone in the classroom is on edge and can’t be kind to each other.
“I think that empathy is something that’s often taken for granted,” Venegas said. “I just think that emotions are often just like swept under the rug in school.”
Students and educators said they hope the skills in the portrait become a regular part of the classroom experience.
“I think right now we’re memorizing, we’re stressing, we’re taking tests, we’re writing,” Venegas said. “I don’t know how much learning we are doing that’s going to benefit us in the future. I think with these competencies we will be learning.”
