Whose Literacies Are Shaping Your Portrait of a Graduate?

Sunday’s post was written on Amtrak 64 on my way to spend the day with New York State educators who are beginning their Portrait of a Graduate design work. Rather than inviting admins to create strategic plans that inspire “buy-in” we’re co-creating a powerful theory of change that slows our roll a bit. Rather than rushing to define what should be done and when and how, this district is beginning somewhere different: by designing professional learning proposals that are responsive to the spoken interests and needs of the children they serve, their teachers and caregivers, the wider faculty and staff, and community members. They’re describing how curriculum, instruction, and assessment will need to shift in response to that emerging understanding, not because NYSED is mandating it, but because peoples’ values, behaviors, beliefs, thinking, learning, and work are already beginning to evolve.

It’s hopeful stuff, noticing people nodding their heads when I mention my personal biases here, too. Owning them. Offering them up as I speak to the importance of true inquiry in this moment.

For all of our hubris, there is much we do not know about teaching and learning, and we have this incredible opportunity to leverage that reality right now. We have a sort of permission that many of us have been longing for since we crossed the threshold into our very first classrooms in New York State. Barriers still exist, but we’re watching leaders dismantle them. Brick walls are functioning a bit more like permeable membranes.

And honestly, that’s concerning to many--including myself--too. Because for all the inequities perpetuated by standardized testing in my state, I know from experience how those tests helped us notice disparity and attend to it better, too.

I wonder: How might we be discerning as we realize all that’s possible? Which structures, tools, and protocols will help us know what we do not yet know? How do we temper our doing by leaning into our learning? Where can we tap truly diverse perspectives and find critical friends in this work?

The Questions I’m Sitting With

Inquiry and performance and project based learning and assessment demand multiliteracy mojo. I wonder: Are we willing to deepen our understanding of what this means and how to cultivate it? Are we actively situating that teaching and learning inside of this new world we’re attempting to create? Do we even have a schema for this?

That’s what I was thinking about as I took the train into the capital region on Sunday. If you missed that post here’s the TLDR: Most are constructing their Portraits of a Graduate on top of a definition of literacy that almost nobody has stopped to interrogate.

Today’s post is for those that do.

And here’s the trouble with attempting to interrogate our biases about literacy in community: The moment we stand at the front of a room and suggest that any definition of literacy is too narrow, we’ve positioned ourselves as the authority and everyone else as the corrected. Everyone’s guard goes up, and that makes sense. Our beliefs about what literacy is and how we cultivate it are the byproduct of hard learning and work and every proud moment that print made possible. People protect these definitions--at least in part-- because they’re woven into how they measure their own worth, too.

So we need to take care here. Skilled facilitators understand that it’s not our job to drop knowledge, upskill the masses, shame or blame people, or assume we know best. We sure don’t. Our job is to build experiences where people can question what they know and observe rather than defend against what they’re merely told.

Leaders deserve these experiences, too. Especially facilitators like me. And we can be intentional about creating them.

What Counts in Your Context?

For years, my documentation work in schools has shown me where kids’ authentic learning experiences come from. When we ask children what makes them spark (hat tip to West Valley CSD teachers here), what learning actually feels like in their bodies and how they know it’s happening, what they love to play and make and write outside of school, and who their audiences are beyond our classrooms, their answers carry more authority than any argument we might construct around a table or flip chart.

When we ask children to define the most meaningful, memorable, awesome stuff they ever learned and then clarify whether that felt more like work or play and whether it happened at home or at school, we discover much that makes honoring the spirit and intention behind the Portrait possible. And when children document their out-of-school learning and share those stories with their teachers, we change in ways no workshop ever accomplishes. When the evidence of learning is provided by the very learners the redesign is meant to serve, nobody in the room can dismiss it as mere theory.

So here is a small protocol I’ve been using. It asks about forty minutes of time from a mixed stakeholder group: teachers, caregivers, learners, employers, leaders, anyone with a stake in the portrait you’re drafting together. It also moves in three parts.

• First, the group gathers evidence of what young people are actually making right now, in school and beyond it. Adults can list what they’ve witnessed: the videos, the builds, the playlists, the fan fiction, the small businesses, the mods and maps and murals. Better still, conduct empathy interviews with learners. Bring their learning stories and documentation into the room, and center all of that in the work.

• Sort the evidence into two columns, work that school currently recognizes and credits, and work that it doesn’t. In my experience, this goes quickly, and the imbalance between those two columns is almost visceral. That imbalance does the real teaching.

• Finally, you invite the group to study the uncounted column together: What do these experiences and the products they generate demand of their makers? Which of our draft portrait competencies do they already align to? And what does the fact that we don’t count them reveal about how we’ve defined literacy and learning? What does it reveal about who those incomplete definitions have served?

There is a companion move worth making before you dig into any of this too: Ask the teachers you serve to document their own self-motivated professional learning, the learning that happens outside of whatever their systems require and whatever you’re offering up. The stories that emerge are always varied and textured, and together they reveal a deep collective expertise that leaders like me rarely notice unless we ask. Teachers who articulate their own uncounted learning walk into this work differently. They recognize what’s at stake, because it’s theirs too.

The uncounted column becomes design material after that. It’s where composite learner portraits deepen, where pathway proposals find their evidence, and where a community’s theory of change starts to evolve differently and better.

If you try this, I’d love to hear what surfaces in your rooms and in you, because I suspect most of us carry an uncounted column of our own. I’ll be writing more here about my work with New York State teachers and administrators in the coming weeks, focusing on multiliteracy development, the critical role that pedagogical documentation must play here, and how our own inquiry work can shape real theories of change. If this interests you and you’d like to chat more, let’s connect. I’m not one to gatekeep, and while many are competing around this work and holding their cards pretty close, I’m kinda known for sharing. Glad to.