Portrait of a Graduate (POG) is a growing national program that originated with the nonprofit from Ohio called Battelle for Kids. POG emphasizes the growth of five specific skills over strict memorization of content. The five skills are communicator, collaborator, ethical & global citizen, creative & critical thinker and goal-directed & resilient individual. POG skills are supposed to be used as ideas that teachers incorporate into their curriculum so that students can reflect on their growth, but does POG actually improve learning or content? FCPS, by requiring POGs use, has turned these skills as a box around which content is crammed into, this causes students and teachers to restrict the depth of possible ideas, reflection and growth. 

Is POG  even effective if teachers aren’t giving directly relevant feedback on students’ work, and are we getting enough from our teachers to make the program effective at all? 

“If I give my students feedback about creativity and then they come and see me, then it’s effectively used…[and] it’s not a waste of time,” Madison science teacher Carol Dalmet said. 

“I don’t feel like I’m improving,” Logan Beam (’27) said in response to a question on whether he thought POG was implemented well. 

He’s not the only one who felt this way. Similar sentiments came up for most students.  

“Most of my teachers don’t mention any of the Portrait of a Graduate goals.” Abby Blevins (‘25) said.

On top of that, some of the skills aren’t relevant to all subjects. Math is not a class that maps well onto the skill of ethical & global citizen which applies more to the humanity subjects. It would be impractical for a math teacher to try to force this topic into a lesson or to ask students to reflect on it. 

These nebulous ideas can also be hard to pin down for students. Between one English essay and another, a student might get a better grade. But are they goal directed and resilient or did they just gain a better understanding of how their English teacher grades essays? In middle school art they focused particularly on the ethical & global citizen skill, but what does it mean for a random self portrait to be ethical or related to global citizenship? As students, we were not the one sourcing the supplies ethically and our work does not  even affect our classmates. Why would it affect or contribute in any way to the world? By making both students and teachers conform to these abstract standards, we gain nothing, and waste class time filling out rubrics that don’t make us better writers or even more organized and perseverant. It’s literally a test on how well we can make stuff up.

By structuring learning around these skills in shallow, performative ways, what do any of us at Madison actually gain by continuing to use this program? 

“I don’t think it has ever actually made me do anything…legit…in my classes,” Benny Nguyen (’25) said. 

If POG is a way to implement these soft skills, and teachers are already shifting towards teaching skills rather than memorization, why do we actually need the POG program? Is this just one more way our county is trying to seem innovative to outsiders instead of actually improving students’ learning experience and teachers’ lessons?

While movements like POG seek to replace strict memorization and regurgitation-based learning with engaging, real life skills by replacing flat requirements with these new ones, we aren’t actually challenging teachers to change their teaching styles. Programs like POG superficially require students and teachers to do more busy work without actually trying to change the style of lessons to a more engaging, deeper exploration of content.