You defined the graduate. Now you have to show it is happening.
Most districts can describe the competencies that matter locally: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, and self-direction. Far fewer can say where their students actually stand on them, or whether they are growing. Portraits of a Graduate are adopted widely and championed by superintendents, yet the competencies inside them never show up on a standardized test. So they are the hardest thing in the building to measure, and the easiest to leave as a poster on the wall.
LearningPulse measures them, from the work students are already producing.
The competencies in a Portrait are qualitative, they are cross-disciplinary, and they live in the actual work students do, not in a bubble sheet. A student demonstrates critical thinking in a lab conclusion, communication in an essay, and self-direction in a reflection. None of that is visible to an end-of-year test.
So most measurement attempts fall back on surveys, self-report, or a once-a-year rubric that a few people score by hand. It is slow, it is inconsistent, and by the time you have the picture the year is over. The Portrait becomes a statement of values instead of a thing you can plan around.
Every day, students produce essays, lab reports, projects, and reflections. Inside that work is direct evidence of the competencies you care about. The problem was never a lack of evidence. It was that reading it carefully, across every student and every class, was too time-intensive to be a regular practice.
That is the exact problem LearningPulse was built to solve.
You define each competency the way your district already describes it. LearningPulse treats that definition as criteria, reads the work students submit, and shows where each student, class, grade level, and the whole system stands against it, with every finding cited back to the student's own words.
Because it reads the work itself, it can tell competencies apart inside a single artifact. In one district, a science teacher put it plainly:
If I have all my students submit a lab today, I can see, okay, 80% of them are at the proficient level in their conclusion, but I only have 20% proficient in experimental design.
Dr. Dave Frangiosa, High School Science Teacher, Pascack Valley Regional HS District
That is two distinct competencies, measured from one lab, in minutes. A Portrait is simply that same move, pointed at the competencies your community chose.
The mechanism is already running in schools. Agnes Irwin benchmarked every middle school writer against its own writing progressions in the first two weeks of the year, then made growth visible all year. Different criteria, same engine: local definitions of good, applied to real student work, fast enough to act on.
A Portrait is a promise about who a student becomes, so it has to be read as growth, not as a single snapshot. LearningPulse reads a student's body of work over time and shows how far they have come against their own earlier work, with side-by-side excerpts as the proof. That same evidence rolls into MTSS reviews, IEP updates, and curriculum planning, so the Portrait informs decisions instead of sitting beside them.
Competencies do not belong to one subject, and neither does the analysis. LearningPulse reads across disciplines, science labs and English essays alike, and rolls the results up from a single student to a class, a grade level, a building, or the whole district. Leaders see where the Portrait is strong and where it needs attention, in time to change what happens next, and with evidence concrete enough to bring to a board.
This is not a new theory. It is a practical way to do what the research has long recommended: define what good looks like and measure work against it (Sadler; Wiggins and McTighe), compare a student to their own earlier work rather than to a curve (Hughes; Martin), and get the evidence back while there is still time to act.
Bring a set of real student work and a competency from your Portrait, and see LearningPulse measure it. Register for a 30-minute webinar on Student Work Analysis, or book a demo for a private walkthrough and a trial conversation.
Next live session: Tuesday, July 14, 1:00 PM ET.