Annually, the WINGS program brings a unique perspective on learning, diversifying the student experience. For the 2024-2025 school year, JMHS administration has unveiled their newly improved guidelines for the program .
The WINGS program aims to encourage student growth in each of the five FCPS Portrait of a Graduate (POG) skills. These include: goal-directed and resilient, ethical and global citizen and creative and critical thinker and communicator and collaborator. Each skill serves a distinctive purpose in a student’s academic and future career, helping them develop a more absolute ownership of their learning experience.
“When WINGS is done well, the student feels appreciated by their peers and adults in the building for all of their hard work,” Beth Blankenship said. “Kids are always in this kind of rat race, so the hope of WINGS is to bring some humanity to that rat race.”
The WINGS program is just one of many formats of reflection on the POG skills that are required by FCPS. Each school varies in their methods, but must complete a Portrait of a Graduate Presentation of Learning . These are inspired by the Virginia Department of Education requirement of the integration of Profile of a Graduate Life-Skills (which are identical to POG). Each skill reflects the national adoption of a system of competency-based learning, which favors the development of skills, rather than simply information in order to benefit students in a future work-environment.
“When you go to college, but more importantly when you go to work, oftentimes you’ll have to stop and be asked to assess your own abilities in skills in that job and advocate for yourself,” Blankenship said. “Being able to clearly articulate what it is you can do and having evidence to support that is a life skill that is equally or more important than any of the things you will learn in a class.”
This coming school year, a few changes have been made to improve student growth. The first of these modifications is the introduction of the Graduate Portfolio Planning Document for 9th graders. This document is a place for ninth graders to save artifacts showing their POG skills without reflections, and will be used in place of the WINGS Portfolio website. 10th graders will still utilize their websites. All underclassmen will be required to demonstrate their growth in the collaborator skill as well as an additional chosen POG skill through a series of artifacts and for 10th grade detailed reflections.
“The ninth grade changes were initiated because kids from Thoreau were doing a POG planning doc, so we thought that it might be nice for them to see something similar to what they’d been seeing,” Blankenship said.
As for upperclassmen, juniors will be required to either continue to use their WINGS Portfolio, or reflect using the newly introduced Mastery Learning Record Competencies (MLR). MLR uses the Educational Testing Service nonprofit Mastery Transcript Consortium, a group which aims to make competency-based learning available to all. 11th graders will be given the option to use MLR to create a transcript or learning record that documents their levels of competency in specific content and life skills.
“At the 11th grade level, the learning record legitimizes the whole WINGS portfolio and program,” Blankenship said. “Ostensibly, it is a WINGS portfolio that the world can see, and it is something that students are using internationally to get into colleges, and it is growing.”
“So, we can either be behind or we can be ahead, ” Blankenship said. “And Madison refuses to be behind.”