Professional Learning
From Portrait to Practice: Learning Alongside Other Districts
The board approves the Portrait, the poster goes up, and the people who helped name it move on. What they leave behind is the hardest part.
Something quiet happens after a district finishes its Portrait. The board approves it, the poster goes up, and the people who helped name the vision move on to the next initiative. What they leave behind is the hardest part, and no one hands you a script for turning the words into practice. Now California just named its own Portrait of a Learner, putting the state's weight behind this work.
You Are Not the Only One Stuck
Most leaders improvise, mostly alone. They build a rubric from scratch and wonder if someone already did it better. They get asked in a cabinet meeting how it is going and answer, honestly, that they are not sure. And nearly every one of them is half-convinced their district is the only one this stuck.
More than a hundred California districts are doing something similar right now. Someone has already built the rubric you are agonizing over and learned ways to engage educators in new practices. The knowledge exists; it just takes bringing districts together to network and share ideas.
The First Room Built for This
That is what the Portrait of a Learner IGNITE Summit is for, the first statewide gathering built for district teams curious about this work or fully implementing and ready to share. The summit is September 27-29 at Hayes Mansion in San Jose. Keynotes and workshops fill the two days, but the reason to come is the people in the room, the networking and learning from others. Bring the team that owns the work, and you leave with your next steps.
The Movement Behind It
IGNITE is also where the larger movement this work belongs to gathers. Travis Allen, co-president of the Human Intelligence Movement, gives the opening keynote. Along with a high-energy pre-conference, Unlock Human Intelligence, kicks things off with ProSolve.
And the Year After
A summit is just a spark of momentum. Lasting change happens in the Scaling Student Success Community of Practice. ProSolve leads Building Coherence Between Vision and Practice, a cohort for districts that have done the naming and now face the harder question of how to connect their Portrait of a Learner across the system. It's a year of deep work with districts ready to move from Portrait to practice. We designed this strand specifically for districts that have done the vision work and are now facing the harder question of how to implement it across instruction and assessment.
So as you look toward next year, who are you actually trying to figure this out with, and who is a step ahead that you could learn from?
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.
