Meeting Summaries & Recordings

At the first meeting of the Albemarle County Public Schools Portrait Design Team meeting, the charge to the group was shared – to inform leadership decision making regarding the establishment of a prioritized set of learning competencies that represent locally derived expectations for its graduates. The context was set for this work by sharing with this team the divisions emphasis on equity and anti-racism, as well as its excitement to be underway in a strategic planning process.

This Portrait of a Graduate will form the basis for the Division’s future state, for which a strategic plan will be formed to realize that vision. While these expectations are often referenced as Portrait of a Graduate competencies, they have very real and direct implications for learning throughout the whole division, pre-k through 12th grade.

The Design Team will inform leadership by providing responses to a series of information and prompts, ranging from the relevance of well-documented societal changes (e.g., emergence of automation, accelerating innovation, declines in empathy, etc.) to the strength of community-authored aspirations for ACPS Graduates to the balance of competencies across various purposes.

The rest of this first meeting was for the Design Team to give their reaction to the importance of the first six of twelve landscape shifts (societal changes) having to do with workforce changes and several examples of pace of innovation shifts.

Portrait Design Team Kickoff Meeting 1A

At this second meeting, we reviewed the data collected from the Design Team meeting reflecting the Team’s responses to the first six landscape shifts before collectively considering the remaining six landscape shifts.

These societal shifts related to global changes, such as demographic changes in world and U.S. population and environmental degradation, as well as related to changes in human interaction, such as civil discourse, empathy, and personal connections. After wrapping up the Team processing of the last landscape shifts, attention shifted to preparing for Design Team member development of individual aspirations about Albemarle graduates.

Meeting Three starts out with Design Team members jurying/rating the anonymous submissions of Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations about Albemarle graduates, as the second source of information to inform the prioritization the district’s Portrait competencies.

Portrait Design Team Kickoff Meeting 1B

Four sources of information were gleaned from Meeting Three to round out the five data sources that inform Albemarle's unique set of competencies for its Portrait.

The meeting started out with jurying the 40 Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations that the Team members anonymously and previously provided. Afterwards, the Design Team learned that the “universe” of competencies can be categorized into three groups: Strength of Heart competencies, Strength of Mind competencies, and Strength of Will competencies. How should Albemarle’s Portrait reflect these categories? All three categories represented or should the Portrait lean heavily to a subset of those categories?

In addition to collecting Design Team members responses to that question, the meeting then yielded members’ individual thoughts about the most important competencies, given what they learned about how society has changed, the graduate aspirations they juried, and their own experiences. Subsequently, 12 groups of team members worked as small teams to each prioritize a set of competencies for submission to the process, and those 12 sets of competencies serve as the fifth and final source of information leadership will consider before drafting a subset of competencies for the Design Team to respond to at the beginning of Meeting Four.

Finally, the Team discussed the importance of communicating this work to the internal and external district communities, messaging the rebalancing of learning outcomes this Portrait represents. As a result of this need, Design Team members shared their thoughts about components of an effective message – local, easily recognized community identity markers and the Big Idea for what this shift should mean for students and the community.

Portrait Design Team Meeting 2

The emerging Albemarle Portrait competencies were shared with the Design Team, connecting information streams together to show how the prioritized skills/mindsets were identified. After sharing the rationale for this draft set, Design Team members broke into smaller groups to consider the soundness of the set, based on the information collected and the visions shared about an Albemarle graduate.

Design Team reaction to the draft set was gauged to see how ready the group was for moving on in the process. Fifty-eight out of 60 Design Team members indicated support with this set as a reasonable building block for taking forward in this process.

The next step was to refine the starter descriptions for each of the prioritized competencies, based on language and parts of the description that resonate with the Albemarle community. Also, at this stage, the Design Team was asked to suggest one or two additional competencies for leadership consideration to “round-out”/finalize the set.

Consideration was next given to communicating this work out to the internal and external communities who were not part of this process. To this end, the Design Team focused on a model of Portrait of a Graduate imagery that is often associated with this work as a way to organize this communication. These models incorporate two important themes to efficiently convey the Portrait of a Graduate: the local design element (these competencies were decided on locally) and the “Big Idea” (to contextualize purpose and aspiration around these competencies). As such, the Design Team provided feedback along both of these themes.

Finally, the group was broken up into role-specific stakeholder groups (i.e., administrators, teachers, support staff, community members, students, parents, etc.) to share their perspectives on this work … why Portrait of a Graduate? What is it? How is it different from education historically, etc.? This feedback not only informs an understanding for how different role groups are tracking this work, but this feedback, too, can support communications about these visioning efforts.

The goal of this meeting was to make the transition from the visioning phase of the strategic planning process (i.e., Portrait of a Graduate) to the inquiry phase, otherwise known as the current state analysis work. At the beginning of the session, leadership shared the present Portrait competency set under consideration, showing the revisions and set modifications stemming from the feedback gained at the last meeting. 

There are eight competencies, reflecting the strength of mind, strength of heart, and strength of will competencies. After the Team was updated on the revised competency set and accompanying definitions, the Design Team moved to breakout rooms to generate “Million Dollar Question,” reflecting their curiosities and interests related to implementing the Portrait competencies. 

As a whole Design Team, forty-nine questions were drafted, which leadership will provide responses to at its December 15th Design Team meeting. In the continuing work to best communicate the change and priority this Portrait represents, the Design team members provided additional feedback about the Big Ideas they believe should be conveyed via this Portrait Design Image.  

Finally, the transition to the inquiry phase was fully realized at this meeting when the participants were asked to break back out into small groups to draft perceptions statements about the current state of Albemarle County Public Schools, in terms of its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. More than 130 perceptions reflecting these four considerations resulted from their efforts, which will be juried/rated at the December 15th meeting to determine which statements are most strongly supported for key consideration during the strategic plan development. 

Albemarle County Public Schools engaged in open community sessions twice during the week of 11/16 to update interested school system stakeholders on the progress of their strategic planning. The emphasis of the update focused on the Portrait of a Graduate concept and its development for the strategic planning process. The early part of the session focused on what a Portrait of a Graduate is, why it is important, how it is different from traditional school outcomes, and how the society has changed to make this time ripe for rebalancing desired student outcomes. 

We then shared the set of competencies ACPS is currently considering for its portrait, as well as the design concepts currently being weighed to signal to the community about this change.  Community members in attendance were then invited to process this information in smaller groups, hearing each other’s takes on the Portrait concept and its emerging manifestation in ACPS, as well as to each other’s preference of the designs to date. Feedback was collected about participant high-level reactions to the  overall direction of the ACPS Portrait and to the design concepts. 

The last hour of the meeting was led by Dr. Matt Haas about anticipated COVID-19 learning loss, especially for our most vulnerable student population. 

Albemarle County Public Schools engaged in open community sessions twice during the week of 11/16 to update interested school system stakeholders on the progress of their strategic planning. The emphasis of the update focused on the Portrait of a Graduate concept and its development for the strategic planning process. The early part of the session focused on what a Portrait of a Graduate is, why it is important, how it is different from traditional school outcomes, and how the society has changed to make this time ripe for rebalancing desired student outcomes. 

We then shared the set of competencies ACPS is currently considering for its portrait, as well as the design concepts currently being weighed to signal to the community about this change.  Community members in attendance were then invited to process this information in smaller groups, hearing each other’s takes on the Portrait concept and its emerging manifestation in ACPS, as well as to each other’s preference of the designs to date. Feedback was collected about participant high-level reactions to the  overall direction of the ACPS Portrait and to the design concepts. 

The last hour of the meeting was led by Dr. Matt Haas about anticipated COVID-19 learning loss, especially for our most vulnerable student population.