Portrait of a Learner: How Backwards Design Can Be a Pathway for Success

More and more school districts are crafting Portraits of Graduate (POG) to highlight the core skills and characteristics they believe students need to be successful in a 21st century global economy. What many of these portraits capture is a distinctive shift away from content knowledge and towards the 21st century skills and dispositions that drive lifelong learning—things like collaboration and self-awareness. This mirrors research on the science of learning that demonstrates how learning includes social emotional processes and is driven by interactions between the learner and their environment. In education there is often a disconnect between what exactly we are trying to teach students, and why, especially as the goals of education are shifting. Backwards design is a process developed to answer that age-old question. This process works to help identify the goals of learning that go beyond a mere acquisition of knowledge, and aim for deeper understanding, in order to be able to design lessons, activities, and assessments that lead towards those goals.

As many districts begin to adopt the POG as their new end goal, we have to truly understand how these 21st century skills develop in a learning context. Our new Portrait of a Learner (POL) model on the Learner Variability Navigator (LVN) synthesizes research across many fields of research including psychology, cognitive science, learning sciences, and education research in order to 1) understand how these 21st century skills develop from the start of schooling to graduation; 2) understand how they vary across learners and contexts; and 3) recognize how they are tightly connected to core factors of learning across a whole learner framework. It is the ultimate exercise in backwards design for the whole learner.

The LVN is a free and open source tool that showcases how learner factors, or individual variables, work together to affect learning (see framework above). The 21st century skills in the far right column of the framework reflect the skills of learning and success within and beyond the classroom, which have been highlighted in many of the POGs adopted by districts. Crucially, this tool has been developed through a rigorous research process, grounding these concepts in learning sciences, and showcasing how they connect and interact across the whole framework. The POL models are broken down into three developmental stages from grades PreK-3, 4-8, and 9-12. We use the science of learning to consider key relationships and developmental changes in the brain and body, social and environmental context, and classroom culture and structure to gauge how to truly understand and support our learners, and ensure that every learner has the skills and tools to embody the POG.

As we developed the POL models, a number of themes emerged from the research that provide insight into how these 21st century skills develop and also how they are intertwined. Understanding these themes is critical for backwards mapping from the POG to designing for the whole learner.

Children are naturally curious, developing questions and seeking solutions about the world and themselves. Curiosity is essential for students to learn how to learn about the world around them, to test and discover physical and social norms, and is a key predictor of academic success. The research on curiosity says that it can shift based on the learner’s knowledge, the context, and how the content is presented. For instance, students are typically more interested in exploring concepts they have minor familiarity with but want to learn more about, whereas too much uncertainty may be daunting and reduce curiosity. As learners progress through the school system, there is often a dip in their expression of curiosity in the classroom. To foster curious learning, learners need the space and opportunities to drive their own learning through discovery. Creating environments that foster belonging and encourage question-asking and exploration, for instance through inquiry-based learning, allows learners to engage in their learning in meaningful and powerful ways.

As learners continue to explore and ask questions, they use critical thinking and reasoning to investigate increasingly complex questions about how the world works. As learners’ cognitive skills develop through adolescence, their critical thinking skills develop as well, especially when these skills are explicitly taught and supported. These include an increased ability to think abstractly, use logic, and consider hypothetical scenarios or ideas. Critical thinking involves many reasoning processes and cognitive skills that are important for preparing learners for their future roles as active, participating members in society.

Collaboration includes the ability to work with diverse teams, exercise flexibility, and make compromises to accomplish a shared goal, all important for success in the classroom and beyond. Creating an environment that fosters true collaboration means ensuring that everyone feels comfortable, supported, and invested in the work. Engaging students in ways that support their collaboration can spark creativity as they learn to improvise, consider others’ perspectives, and build off one another, generating novelty both individually and as a group. This creative process is a core element of all learning experiences, because individuals usually learn most effectively when they play an active role in constructing their understandings. Similar to curiosity, creativity is best fostered when learners feel safe to experiment and make mistakes, either individually, or as a group. Using a strengths-based approach that helps students build awareness of their strengths and the strengths of their peers, can help students engage more effectively in collaborative and creative projects. Supporting learners’ cooperative problem-solving allows them to work together to collaboratively discuss and analyze complex concepts, come up with novel solutions, navigate social scenarios, and can provide autonomy for learners as they begin to grapple with more complex content.

Identity development is the process through which individuals develop a sense of self and establish a unique understanding of who they are. It underlies how they interact with the world. As they get older, students’ worlds become larger, as they become more engaged in their communities, both local and digital. Students are exploring their civic and social identities, values, and worlds. Increasingly, digital spaces and social media provide opportunities to present and explore individual identities. With the increased access that digital spaces provide, digital literacy skills, including heightened critical understanding of source evaluation, and online safety become incredibly important.

A learner’s civic identity is grounded in having a sense of self as part of a larger whole. Exploring their identities and values is key to guiding their actions in their communities, and developing civic-mindedness. Even young learners are capable citizens, engaging with their home, class, and local communities. As students become more confident in their ability to engage and act on social issues, they can also become more empowered as individuals and involved in their learning. Encouraging students to consider their own needs, and promoting self-advocacy can support their sense of self, and their civic-mindedness. Providing students choice over different aspects of what and how they learn promotes their sense of agency in the classroom.

Across all these core factors of 21st-century learning, we see the critical element of a need to feel safe and secure in order to try new things, share perspectives, explore identities, make mistakes, advocate, and engage, all of which require a sense of belonging. Belongingness is the extent to which students feel personally valued, included, and supported by others in their learning environment. Research suggests that teachers have a unique opportunity to promote belongingness, because teacher support is one of the strongest predictors of learners’ sense of belonging. Culturally-responsive teaching practices can help all students feel respected and valued in the classroom, including validating students’ varied background knowledge and lived experiences, identities, and ways of knowing.

When we look at the Portrait of a Graduate, we have a sense of who we want our learners to become, but the Portrait of a Learner is our guide to understand who our learners currently are. When we work backwards, we are able to see both, and design a pathway for success. The POL shows us why whole learner approaches matter for developing students who can thrive in the 21st century economy and society. Who we are is inextricably intertwined with how we learn and how we connect to our environment. Taking a whole learner approach includes designing learning that takes into consideration how we learn across development and contexts, recognizes and affirms students’ strengths across the whole child, and provides opportunities to leverage those strengths within a joyous, safe, and supportive environment that fosters deeper learning.