This blog post is the third in a series documenting Norwalk Public Schools’ journey to create, implement and be formed by a living Portrait of a Graduate. Abby & Kimberly met through a PoG workshop in May of 2025, and are documenting how their intersecting work is supporting the PoG coming to life in Norwalk.
Lever 1: Building/Deepening a Culture of Reflection (Abby)
The concept of reflection is not new in education. We can easily reach for the familiar quote from John Dewey, “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience” (Dewey, 1910/1933), which has been shared many times over the last 100 years. However, in a world where teachers are asked to fit more and more into each class period of the day, reflection is often the first thing to go as the seconds tick down before the bell rings and there are 10 more slides to get through in the lesson, 4 students have their hands up with questions, and the main office breaks in with announcements about tomorrow’s spirit day… Sorry, reflection-maybe we will get to you tomorrow. Unfortunately, when we sacrifice those reflective moments, we often are giving up the opportunity for each learner to make their own meaning of what they have just experienced… to spend a moment to bring it into their own bodies and to ask themselves, “what did I just learn/do, and what do I think about it? Why is it meaningful (or not) to me in my own life? What do I want to do next in relation to this?”
When we bring in the complex cognitive and social-emotional skills that are found in Portraits across the country, the value and necessity of reflection becomes even more critical. In fact, though I try to avoid making unequivocal statements about most things in this world, I believe that it is impossible for a PoG to be truly meaningful without a culture of reflection supporting it. This belief stems from thousands of reflective moments I have witnessed in which learners (young people and adults) articulate how they have changed as a result of their learning journey with these skills. And it is what I find glaringly absent when I enter a school for which the PoG remains 2-dimensional…simply a poster on the wall, or a page on a website. This led me to identify reflection as the first lever for deeper PoG implementation.
In the workshop where I first met Kimberly, I shared a clip from a video created by What School Could Be that highlights an inspirational school on the Hawaiian island of Oahu called SEEQS. The video unpacks the Portfolio Defense experience that SEEQS students complete in 8th grade, during which they reflect on their growth and learning in the SEEQS Sustainability Skills (their PoG). Discussing the importance of reflection in this process, SEEQS Executive Director Buffy Cushman-Patz, says,
“…reflection is everything. I mean, learning comes through reflection. So much of school is designed around someone else telling you whether you got something. But what matters is whether I know that I got something. It is how we build confidence, it’s how we operate in the world. […] And it’s the process of reflection that gives you the ownership of what you know and are able to do. Otherwise, you are doing something for someone else and that’s, you know, a grade that a teacher is going to give you. But reflection is about what I know and what I value.”
Buffy articulates such important components of reflection here – the connection to confidence and to ownership of our own learning… and those things are undeniably true in the Defenses of Learning done by SEEQS students – it is clear that has been their experience of learning throughout their time at SEEQS.
So when I talk with folks about the lever of reflection when implementing a PoG, I try to emphasize that reflection is a really rich access point for the PoG. It is a great first lever because a school or district can start to incorporate reflection on the skills of its PoG without needing to do an overhaul of curriculum or implement a complicated reporting system before trying. The act of each learner in the system making connections between what they are learning/doing, a skill from the PoG, and their lives outside of the walls of school is an incredibly powerful opportunity to authentically begin to situate the PoG as central to all learning and growth.
The Norwalk Story, Part 2: Using Reflection as a Lever for Deeper Implementation (Kimberly)
During our first year of implementation, we found ourselves circling one essential question: how can we meaningfully assess the Portrait of a Graduate competencies? We wanted to provide teachers, leaders, and students with clear, actionable information about their Portrait of a Graduate competency growth. However, our early attempts revealed a gap. We initially tried linking the competencies to existing district assessments, but these measures told us very little about how students were actually developing the skills we valued most.
To better understand what authentic assessment might look like in Norwalk, we launched an internal K-12 assessment cohort in the spring of 2025. Educators in the cohort faced a key tension: if these competencies are essential to students’ success, then students deserve honest feedback on their development. Yet, rating or grading a student on a Portrait of a Graduate competency often felt uncomfortable or subjective. Together, the group created a set of design principles for a Portrait of a Graduate-aligned assessment, and one idea stood out as foundational: Students need regular opportunities to self-assess and reflect on their growth.
Abby’s work reinforced insights from the internal assessment cohort and showed that reflection could be the lever to advance our Portrait of a Graduate work. Reflection invites students to take ownership of their learning and offers educators authentic insights into students’ thought processes that may not always be captured by a content-specific test. It also fits naturally across all grade levels and subject areas, addressing the challenges we faced in building standardized systems for reporting critical thinking across content areas. While we continue to explore next steps for assessment, we decided to move forward with reflection as a core component of our Portrait work.
If reflection was to meaningfully advance the Portrait of a Graduate, it needed to be embedded not just in classrooms, but within the structures of the district itself. A central part of Norwalk Public Schools’ work is developing systems and structures that create coherence across the district, with the Portrait of a Graduate serving as the north star — a vision set by our Superintendent, Dr. Estrella. With that commitment to coherence in mind, we knew reflection needed to be anchored in a shared framework that could be used consistently across schools and grade levels. We selected Driscoll’s reflection model because it was already familiar in parts of the district and flexible enough to work across roles, content areas, and developmental stages.
We introduced this focus at our Summer 2025 Leadership Retreat, intentionally weaving reflection throughout each session. Leaders engaged in reflection protocols from Harvard Project Zero, CLEE, and EMINTS, experiencing the same structured practices we hope to see embedded in classrooms across the district.
Additionally, we developed a Driscoll’s Reflective Framework Toolkit. The toolkit includes grade-level continuums that show how reflection develops over time, along with elementary and secondary reflection questions and sentence stems. These resources helped district leaders and staff develop a shared understanding of what we mean by reflection and how it can be applied in practice. Since then, the Driscoll model has taken root across our system. It now shows up in data analysis, school improvement planning, and coaching cycles.
In one of our most recent leadership meetings, a building leader said, “Everything comes back to Driscoll’s model of reflection.” This quote speaks to how our district has made reflection a priority. Using the framework has helped us ground our reflection work and bring to life the greater vision Dr. Estrella set for the Portrait of a Graduate.
Reflections on the Lever of Reflection (Kimberly & Abby)
For Norwalk Public Schools, reflection started out as an attempt to solve a problem –how to meaningfully assess growth– but has evolved into something deeper. Students are learning to take ownership of their Portrait development, and adults are finding new ways to make sense of their practice. Reflection is helping us to slow down and connect our daily work to the greater purpose behind the Portrait. We recognize that this is only the beginning of a long journey ahead. Reflection has grounded us in a common practice to build coherence across the district and shapes how we bring the Portrait of a Graduate to life.
If you are thinking about trying out Reflection as a lever of PoG Implementation consider the following things to try:
Small Starts
- START WITH ADULTS – faculty & staff often need a chance to practice the reflective activities that they will then facilitate with students. This helps them to feel more ready to introduce and model the process.
- START SMALL BUT CONSISTENT -try out monthly metacognitive moments in one class where students pick anything they did and connect it to a PoG skill (written, video, voice memo, illustration, etc.)
- START (and stay) LOW STAKES – reflection is ideally not (for the most part) tied to points, grading scales, assessment, etc. Reflection is best when it is authentic, sometimes messy, and responsive to the moment.
- START WITH SHARED PROMPTS – lighten the load on everyone by using shared prompts that are the same so students don’t have to decipher new language, and teachers don’t have to create something new each time.
Building and/or deepening a culture of reflection in your classroom, your school, or your district can be a powerful lever to deepen the learning as well as the implementation of your PoG. Whether you decide to adopt/adapt an existing framework like NPS did, or you try one of the small starts above, incorporating meaningful, learner-centered reflection can have a big impact.
This blog post is the third in a series documenting Norwalk Public Schools’ journey to create, implement and be formed by a living Portrait of a Graduate. Abby & Kimberly met through a PoG workshop in May of 2025, and are documenting how their intersecting work is supporting the PoG coming to life in Norwalk.
Don’t miss the next blog in the series as we explore what it means to embed the PoG into instruction.
