During the 2025-2026 school year, The Peoples Academy Youth-Adult Partnership team (YAP) set out to build a schoolwide understanding of the purpose behind the Portrait of a Graduate (PoG), and put in place practices to make the PoG meaningful and useful. Each month, members of the YAP team returned to the purpose of the PoG and what each of the maple leaves (see image above) represented by developing an activity to be done during the teacher – student advisory (TA) period that explored the meaning of each leaf and connected directly to the PoG.
- Sept: Courageous and Confident Graduate
- Oct: A Lifelong Learner
- Nov/Dec: Responsible & Compassionate Graduate
- Jan: Creative Problem Solver
- Feb: Resilient & Healthy Graduate
- March: Effective Communicator
Members of the Youth-Adult Partnership Team introduced each month’s activity to staff before launching it schoolwide. Advisory activities were first shared during Monday faculty meetings, allowing teachers to experience and become familiar with them. Advisories then implemented the activities during Wednesday community meetings, aligned with each month’s theme. For some activities, teams also shared reflections from the previous month, demonstrating their learning and making connections to the next “leaf.” Here is an example of the Creative Problem Solver TA activity. Students in grades 9-12 collected evidence related to each of the PoG leaves / themes on this PoG evidence template.
Going forward, students will continue to collect evidence from their learning journey that relates to each of the PoG “leaves”. Members of the YAP team in their senior year are piloting a capstone presentation this spring to explore and develop that practice as a culminating act to demonstrate their progress on the PoG journey.
UP’s multi-year partnership with Lamoille South exemplifies how together we can change educational systems, by going from the idea to action to policy and practice transformation.
