By Frédéric M. Martin, Editor-in-Chief
A year ago, the MUSD Board of Trustees decided to consider, design, and implement a set of student goals, beyond the programmatic academic goals, required to graduate from MUSD schools. These goals are to be driven through our K-12 educational programs so graduates can demonstrate these achievements in addition to their academic success, creating a Graduate Profile. This initiative is not new in education, as many other school districts are implementing such concepts, partly in response to business feedback accumulated over the years, that point to some aspects of education that appear to be missing. The six elements are defined, aligned, and planned into each grade level to properly prepare the next generation of graduates who will meet their employers expectations and smoothly access their choice of either college or a quality career. Our industry partners almost unanimously tell us that high school graduates appear to require more developed interpersonal skills, improved basic communication and cognitive skills. These personal and interpersonal capacities will be addressed and taught through the graduate profile, in addition to the required academic achievements. Some refer to the missing aspects of education as soft skills, that are assumed to be learned by the time students graduate from high school. The MUSD graduate profile executive committee identified top level goals and drilled down to specifics for each goal category, referred to as the six elements
These goals indicate that our educational institutions are being asked to further contribute to the overall personal, social and cognitive skillsets needed to properly operate in the world once students leave our schools. To that end, each element features expanded detailed sub categories of goals, or achievement steps to more deeply define the elements with tangible tasks, strategies, and detailed benchmarks applied into MUSD’s K-12 curriculum. A detailed map of each element can be viewed on the We Believe News website page located here. The MUSD Board of Trustees approved the launch of this initiative on May 22, 2018. MUSD leaders are hard at work, researching and designing our own Graduate Profile implementation and associated built-in benchmarks at each grade level. Before school started, 2018, MUSD educators, from all grade levels, worked to define implementation vectors to be articulated into the specific grades’ curricula. Further details will be communicated to the community in this newspaper and in other publications, with the initial goal of piloting two of the six elements — Think and Produce — in the 2018-2019 school year.
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