You’ve created your Portrait of a Graduate. You’ve done the community engagement, named your competencies — things like critical thinking, resilience, collaboration, resourcefulness — and produced a document or a poster.
The hard part is what comes next. Without a concrete instructional approach, a Portrait risks becoming a statement on a website rather than something that shapes what actually happens in classrooms.
That’s the gap an approach like the Critical Skills Classroom (CSC) — developed and taught by Antioch University’s Center for School Renewal — is built to close.
What the Critical Skills Classroom actually is
CSC is not a curriculum, an approach, or a program to bolt onto existing instruction. It’s an approach that’s been refined by teachers over the last 40 years, integrating four methodologies into a coherent classroom practice:
- Collaborative Learning
- Experiential Learning
- Problem-Based Learning
- Standards-Driven Learning
In a Critical Skills Classroom, students work in learning teams, solve real academic and real-world problems, present and exhibit their learning publicly, and reflect systematically on both what and how they’re learning. Teachers shift from delivering content to designing sequenced learning experiences, coaching students through them, and using explicit standards to guide culture, curriculum, and assessment together — rather than treating “skills” and “content” as separate tracks.
That combination is what makes it a natural fit for Portrait work: a Portrait defines the outcomes a community wants; CSC gives teachers a structure that respects their expertise as professionals, building on what they’re already doing, and assessing those outcomes day to day.
How the pieces fit together
| Portrait competency (common examples) | Related CSC methodology |
| Resourcefulness, problem-solving | Problem-Based Learning: curriculum reframed as real problems to solve, not content to receive |
| Community, collaboration | Collaborative & Experiential Learning: work with community partners, learning teams, public exhibitions |
| Ownership, responsibility | Shared classroom ownership: students and teachers as co-learners with joint responsibility for the learning community |
| Named academic + non-academic competencies together | Standards-Driven Learning: explicit standards guide instruction and assessment, so skills aren’t an add-on |
| Any competency requiring evidence of growth | Competency-based, quality-standards assessment: the piece most Portraits are missing early on |
That last row is usually where districts get stuck. Naming a competency is not the same as having a way to see it, teach it, and document growth in it. Our design, instruction, and assessment practices are built specifically to make skills like these observable and gradable without reducing them to a checklist.
In the Franklin, NH School District, the portrait’s six competencies (communication, collaboration, creativity and design, research and analysis, self-direction, and knowledge application) are the compass guiding decisions across curriculum, instruction, assessment, and school culture. More importantly, they’re part of the day-to-day experiences of teachers and students.
They show up in daily instruction, not just in a document. For example, a physics unit culminated in students demonstrating projectile motion and force concepts (and the knowledge application competency) through a cheerleading and stunting performance — not a worksheet.. The district’s curriculum coordinator, Jule Finley, noted the depth of understanding students showed answering follow-up questions, in contrast to material that’s “memorized to plop some answers on a test and forget it two days later.”
They make space for teachers to plan differently. They design real projects connected to community partners, creating experiential, collaborative lessons that combine competencies and academic curriculum goals.
None of this happened by accident — it’s the result of deliberately building teacher capacity in the instructional approach, not just publishing the Portrait language. Unsurprisingly, Franklin High School has been recognized for using its Portrait as a guiding framework for decision-making despite significant socioeconomic and resource challenges.
Questions for leaders considering this path
If you’re leading a Portrait of a Graduate effort and wondering whether an approach like CSC is the right next step, some questions worth asking your team:
- Do our teachers have a shared instructional approach for building Portrait competencies into everyday lessons, or is it up to individual teacher interpretation?
- Can we currently assess and document growth in our named competencies, or only in traditional academic content?
- Are students producing evidence of these competencies (exhibitions, performance tasks, community-connected work) or mostly hearing about them?
- Is our Portrait shaping decisions about curriculum, PD, and assessment or living mainly in communications materials?
If the honest answer to most of these is “not yet,” that’s exactly the gap a Critical Skills Classroom implementation is designed to close. Learn more about how to get started.
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