Portraits and Pathways: Computational Contemplating Pathways Satisfy a Portrait of a Graduate

At Indian Prairie University District (IPSD), found just west of Chicago, one of the critical alignment points—a “north star,” if you will—for the district’s 35 schools is its Portrait of a Graduate profile. Extensively adopted by college districts throughout the place, Portrait of a Graduate outlines the interdisciplinary abilities that a district thinks its learners need to embody and exemplify by higher faculty graduation. For IPSD, these interdisciplinary techniques are 6 core competencies that graduates need to have to thrive, no matter of the path a university student requires following graduation. These competencies contain creativeness and innovation, conversation, critical thinking and difficulty-fixing, citizenship, flexibility and adaptability, and resilience.

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Portraits Offer Route

In IPSD and college districts nationwide, these Portraits of a Graduate explain to the broader community what just one of their graduates should really “look” like. But in the approach of speaking the values and aspirations of the district and wider neighborhood, these Portraits also perform to align the work of educational institutions and educators. In the spirit of backward design and style, by conceiving what effectively-rounded success appears to be like at the conclusion of the K-12 journey, these Portraits lay the foundation for what the pathway alone requires to be.

Pathways Subject

Although a Portrait of a Graduate gives an endpoint of wherever districts hope students will be by graduation, a K-12 pathway is vital to supporting college students to turn into the graduates that university leaders envision them getting to be. Performing in collaboration with districts, which include IPSD, Digital Promise has located the most efficient discovering pathways are cross-curricular and offered persistently across a district’s colleges and within just their school rooms instead than isolated at a couple of magnet schools or constrained to a few training course electives. This obstacle of a significant and equitable instruction pathway is maybe no more urgent than in laptop or computer science (CS) as a self-control and career, the two of which continue to be areas where by people today experience marginalization and exclusion from the earliest ages. 1 end result of this exclusion is children owning inequitable entry to steady, higher-quality computing opportunities.

At Digital Promise, we see district-degree ownership in computer science and, far more commonly, computational considering (CT) as a crucial initiative for all faculty districts. To date, all 50 U.S. states have CS specifications in spot, but the quantity of districts within just each state truly enacting this kind of benchmarks offers a considerably a lot more blurry picture, inconsistent throughout educational facilities and not often cumulatively developing to escalating pupil competence.

For the previous five years (2017-2022), Digital Assure has worked with 8 distinct college districts across 8 distinct states coming up with their very own K-12 Computational Thinking Pathways. 1 final result has been Electronic Promise’s district-facing CT Pathways Toolkit, as nicely as a lately released free and on-desire on line course Establishing District-Large Inclusive Computational Thinking Pathways, hosted on the Infosys Pathfinders On line Institute.

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IPSD was 1 of the very first districts to companion with Digital Assure in the CT Pathways endeavours. Its Portrait of a Graduate profile has been instrumental in ensuring CT is not treated as an erudite tech skill intended for a decide on number of but a elementary skill for all of its students and a veritable signpost for a profile of its graduates. Brian Giovanni, IPSD’s director of innovation and the district’s guide on the CT Pathways venture, details out that IPSD’s Portrait of a Graduate and its CT Pathways work have usually been complementary initiatives. “Our district Portrait supports our intentionality. Integrating features of POG [Portrait of a Graduate], these as ‘creativity and innovation’ and ‘critical thinking,’ truly synch with the skills of IPSD’S CT Pathway, this kind of as ‘creating computational artifacts’ and ‘decomposition.’ It was not one particular much more thing for lecturers to do. It was another implies to enact the Portrait alone.”

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Does your district have such a Portrait of a Graduate? Does it have a commitment to 21st Century Abilities but is nevertheless functioning on accurately what these capabilities are and how they exist throughout the K-12 spectrum? What computer science, coding and computational contemplating do the job are you by now executing, and how does it build and develop across grade bands?

We want to know. This past fall, we released a Nationwide Science Basis task to carry on our perform supporting districts to build their CT Pathways and checking out how districts help each other in this important perform. If you are fascinated in understanding extra and potentially partnering with us to acquire a CT Pathway for your district, finish this brief survey by February 20th to inform us about what you are executing and where by your district would like to go.