There’s a growing trend among both states and school districts to outline their vision of what, exactly, a successful high school graduate looks like.
These so-called “portrait of a graduate” documents detail the skills and attributes students need beyond academic ones to successfully enter postsecondary education or the workforce.
So, what attributes are broadly seen as the most important?
A new analysis by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, has identified the core social-emotional and workforce skills that many districts are coalescing around. Among them: communication, adaptability, and reflection.
These findings support the argument that social-emotional learning is critical for creating a well-rounded education for students, and the portrait of a graduate documents can guide schools’ social-emotional learning initiatives, said Rista Plate, the CASEL’s assistant director of research and learning.
“It’s giving us insight into what are the priorities in K-12 education from the viewpoint of multiple stakeholders,” she said. “It gives us confidence that many who are involved in the education space want to see an emphasis on the development of these competencies.”
Arguments over whether social-emotional skills—also sometimes called character education or life skills—should be taught in schools have become more polarized in recent years. SEL has become a focus of some conservative activists and politicians, who say it indoctrinates students with liberal values. Others argue that SEL allows teachers to practice psychology on students without a license and that it’s edging in on the parents domain and should be taught at home.
Even as SEL has been swept up in political debates, schools have continued to invest in teaching it. And some surveys have found broad support among parents from all political backgrounds for teaching social-emotional or life skills at school.
The idea of creating a portrait of a successful graduate has also faced some criticism that these documents distract from a focus on academics and promote a politically progressive worldview.
These portrait of a graduate documents are often created with input from educators, administrators, students, parents, and local community and business leaders, which means they’re a window into what communities value, said Plate.
In CASEL’s analysis of more than 270 districts’ portrait of a graduate documents, every one of them included at least one social-emotional competency. CASEL groups social-emotional skills under five umbrella competencies: self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, relationship skills, and responsible decisionmaking. Ninety-seven percent of the 272 districts included at least three competencies.
Overall, the portraits prioritized evergreen, durable skills and attributes over content area knowledge or technology-specific competencies, the analysis found.
What skills do districts put the highest priority on?
Communication and adaptability are far and away the most common attributes that show up in districts’ portraits, often appearing multiple times in different forms, such as “communicator” and “communicates effectively.” Communication skills appear nearly 450 times while adaptability appears nearly 400 times.
These skills are also the ones employers are looking for and frequently appear in job postings. The CASEL report notes that LinkedIn found in 2024 that adaptability was a top skill noted in job ads on its site.
“Adaptability is going to make students and their future adult selves be able to adapt to acquire new skills in a changing job landscape, to potentially switch career paths, to learn and to become experts in new technology,” Plate said.
In terms of communication, Plate sees that skill being vital in the future even with the proliferation of generative AI chatbot tools that can compose large swaths of text on most subjects within seconds.
“Even interacting with a chatbot, you need to be able to articulate your question, what you want to know, and assess how well the outputs are that communicate that idea,” she said. “Our ability to communicate with each other is still an incredibly important skill.”
In terms of the other most referenced skills and attributes, “reflection” shows up about 250 times in the portraits analyzed, while “respectful” and “critical thinking” appear about 225 times.
“Creativity,” “collaboration,” and “academic proficiency” have a little more than 200 mentions, while “analysis” and “problem-solving” appear slightly fewer than 200 times.
How to bring a portrait of a graduate to life
The portraits of a graduate in the analysis overwhelmingly prioritize social skills and workforce readiness, along with academic and technical competencies, the report said.
Although these portraits paint a clear vision, they are less likely to provide a roadmap for how to measure progress toward that vision, said Plate.
The report found that most districts are doing a good job compiling and presenting user-friendly portraits that are short, to the point, and have clear visuals and plain language. However, only 11 percent of districts provided guidance on how to implement the goals laid out in their portraits, and only 15 percent include some sort of process for measuring progress.
Five percent of districts also created a “portrait of an educator,” which Plate said can be a meaningful tool to help shore up how educators model the skills students need to develop and help determine what professional learning educators need to embody portrait goals.
Portraits of a graduate are ultimately meant to guide education policy and curricula, and social-emotional learning can help realize those goals, said Plate.
“In drawing attention to the connection between social and emotional learning and the competencies we see in portraits of a graduate, it allows us then to be able to utilize the vast research and evidence base of social and emotional learning that has been done that gives us insights into how we can effectively build these skills with students,” Plate said.