Assessment
How to Measure Whether Your Portrait of a Learner Is Working
Naming the skills was never the hard part. The quieter question is whether they are growing, and whether you could show it.
We have never doubted that these skills matter. We name them, we frame them, we hang them in the front hall and mean every word. What almost none of us can do is answer the board member who asks whether students are actually growing them.
The Quieter Question
That gap is not an implementation problem. Plenty of good people can help you build the crosswalks and train the teachers, and that work matters. The quieter question is whether the skills are growing. It matters for the student, too. The kid who spent all year becoming someone new deserves to be seen for it, in a way a transcript never has.
Two Honest Tries
We reached for the tools we had. We asked students how they felt about their own skills. Perception surveys tell us something real about mindset, but a student's read of herself is not the same as what she can do. We gathered student work into portfolios. A portfolio can hold beautiful evidence, but nothing in it lets you measure growth in terms everyone shares.
Both were good instincts. Neither one hands a teacher, or a board, evidence to stand behind.
Where Growth Becomes Visible
The skills were never truly unmeasurable. We just had to watch them where they live, in the real work students already do, and agree on what we were looking at.
Students collaborate, create, and solve real problems. You score what they do against the competencies your Portrait names, the same way in every classroom. Now the evidence means the same thing from one room to the next.
A benchmark shows where a student stands today. Ongoing checks across the year show whether she is growing, and you know within weeks, while there is still time to act.
Now the quiet student who came alive is named; they are no longer invisible. Her teacher sees what to teach next; growth is seen, and the board has evidence behind its vision.
There Is No Behind
If you cannot yet show whether your Portrait is working, you are not behind. There is no behind, because the tools to see human skills at scale barely existed until recently.
We believe that assessing human skills in authentic application, scored against the competencies you named, allows you to actualize your vision.
Learn more about how we are assessing, reporting and improving human skills.
Dr. Michelle Ament
Dr. Michelle Ament is a national voice for reimagining learning and leadership in the Intelligence Age. She spent 30 years inside K-12 as a classroom teacher and district administrator. As ProSolve's Chief Academic Officer, she helps districts measure, report on, and improve the human skills the workforce is asking for. Michelle is Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement and host of Unscripted Intelligence.
