At BCPS, our mission is “to inspire and equip our students to succeed in life.” To ensure that our mission can be accomplished, we developed, tested, and revised the Graduate Profile using feedback from staff, students, parents, community members, and local businesses. The Graduate Profile includes six competencies focused on empowering and equipping BCPS students for life after high school.
“Our goal is to ensure our students leave BCPS with what they need for a successful, rewarding career,” says Adrienne Usher, Assistant Superintendent. “These six competencies provide students with the skills and dispositions to succeed in an ever-changing world by connecting classroom experiences to life outside the classroom.”
We will be featuring different aspects of the Profile throughout our future newsletters; to begin this segment, we have included an overview of each of the BCPS Graduate Profile competencies below.
Community Contributor: Being a community contributor means that you recognize a need and contribute to solutions by planning and engaging in actions to positively impact local, regional, and/or global communities. Throughout active participation in the community, students will not only demonstrate safe, legal, and ethical behavior, but will also demonstrate empathy and respect for diverse cultures and opinions.
Effective Communicator: Communication is more than conveying ideas clearly in verbal form; it’s also ensuring clarity through written, visual, and digital forms. Effective communicators adjust their messages according to the context, purpose, and needs of the audience. Students explore and exchange ideas with other learners through listening and engaging in productive discourse.
Productive Collaborator: To be a productive collaborator, a student must be able to form partnerships with diverse groups of learners. They should be able to work with others to achieve common goals. Productive collaborators listen to others’ viewpoints to manage conflicts and find solutions that work toward outcomes. When necessary, they apply constructive feedback to improve outcomes and achieve goals.
Innovative Problem Solver: Innovation stems from gathering and analyzing information from a variety of sources to develop new solutions. Students will analyze and evaluate the feedback and the impact of approaches on the potential outcome of the work.
Mastery Learner: Within our schools, our students are constantly learning. When our students demonstrate mastery of learning, they are able to apply learned content to settings and contexts beyond the classroom. They apply a growth mindset to persevere when engaging with novel ideas, situations, and challenges. They are able to reason and make adjustments as required based on new knowledge and experiences.
Self-Directed Navigator: When students demonstrate being self-directed navigators, they set goals and develop action plans to drive their own learning and achieve those goals. They prioritize tasks and effectively manage their time by using their strengths and resources around obstacles until their goals are achieved. They are consistently reflecting on their challenges and failures to find opportunities to learn and improve.
Throughout our next monthly newsletters, we will be digging into each of these competencies to see what they look like in action.