Process

Planning & Preparing

Gather Input

Draft Foundational Skills

Refine Foundational Skills

Planning & Preparing

3 months (August through November).

At the start of the school year, we began the skills revision in earnest. Kirby Morgan led the effort as part of his Mastery Learning Coordinator work, and he had been wanting to engage in this work for over a year. As part of the team that drafted the original skills for ILHS, he knew there was opportunity for improvement. During that initial process, the team had based their work on an existing set of skills and modified them according to what seemed to suit the situation best at the time. There was no student or family input in the original creation of the skills, though feedback was gathered after the initial draft was created. As we began using the skills, we discovered some definite areas that needed improvement.

For the first couple months of the year, along with teaching and organizing staff professional development, Kirby created a plan for how the revision process would take place. It began with some loose notes that formed into the outline shown below. While this plan changed over time, it provided structure to the process. The guiding principles of the plan:

The better the information input into the revision, the better the outcome would be.
Skills should prepare students for success in school, career, and life.
Skills should integrate with classes, but not be specific to just academics.
Align with existing descriptions of needed soft skills, such as those described in a portrait of a graduate.
Include time for multiple revisions based on stakeholder feedback.
Students' skills will be reported on the Mastery Learning Record, so the skills should be structured to work well with that presentation.
Skills will be the basis for upcoming work around course-specific competencies and assessment.

Gather Input

3 months (November through February).

The first decision about gathering input was one of format. It seemed that many previous efforts by schools and organizations to gather information about the relative importance of skills depended on asking stakeholders to choose their most important skills from a long list of pre-chosen skills. We did not want to go this route, since it would necessarily make many decisions for our stakeholders. We decided, instead, to leverage emerging AI options that could analyze natural-language data. We created six simple questions that we would ask of each stakeholder group:

What skills do you believe are most important for students to be successful at school (including high school, university, and vocational)?
What skills do you believe are most important to prepare students to be successful at work (including entry-level jobs, professional careers, and military)?
Describe what you believe are the qualities of a successful life. Consider all aspects of life, including happiness and well-being.
What skills do you believe are most important to prepare students to be successful in life?
Are there any other skills you would like to suggest as highly important for students to learn in their time at ILHS?
If you would like to provide any additional input, please do so here!

We used a Google Form since it was already a familiar part of our digital workflow and the output would be in an easy-to-analyze spreadsheet.

The first request for input went to staff in the middle of November. If any changes would be needed to the questions or process of requesting information, those changes could be made much more easily with staff than with other stakeholders. When the last staff member submitted their input in early December, the data was looking good. The responses provided good insights into the staff's priorities. A trial run of using AI to analyze the data and create a set of skills from it provided promising results. We decided this form would work to solicit information from other stakeholders.

We also considered how to get input from as many stakeholders as possible, with a special focus on how to include those who normally would not tend not to participate. Students and families who are part of historically marginalized groups have tended to shy away from providing input on school matters. They often feel like outsiders to "the system" and so feel like their input must be less valuable. We met with a small group of students, who helped us decide to do live discussions with every student and send papers home to families.

The group of students suggested we have live discussions to involve everyone, but that they should not take place in Crew, lest familiar social dynamics and habits limit the responses. Students were placed into randomized groups and assigned spaces to meet during one of our Wednesday Flex slots in early January. There they were prompted to answer the same questions from the form. Staff wrote down the student responses, which were then gathered into a single document. The only edits made to the data were formatting and removing a few names to keep the data anonymous. In addition, students were also provided with the link to a Google Form where they could either provide additional input beyond the discussions or have their voice heard if they were absent or otherwise not part of the conversations. 16 students chose to submit the form.

To get family input, the student group suggested sending a piece of paper home with every student "elementary style" to get signed by families and returned by the students. We created the page to go home with information about the project and multiple ways to submit input: A QR code and its URL for the electronic submission and the form questions on the back of the page. A signature area was included and provided parents the option to check that "I am opting to not complete the survey. (There are no negative repercussions for this choice.)" 40 families submitted input electronically, while another 13 submitted their written input on paper.

Finally, we reached out to our alumni. We had email addresses for many of them and reached out to ask them to also complete a Google Form. Their form included a few additional questions that helped to frame how our skills are playing out in life after high school. We were glad to receive even the five responses we received. The additional questions for the alumni were:

What skills have you found to be the most important and useful (in any/all contexts) since you graduated from ILHS?
What skills were you told would be important, but you have not yet found to be important?
Compared to other recent high school graduates, how prepared have you felt for school, work, or other endeavors?
Optional: If you have any other information you can provide about your preparedness for life after high school, please share it here!

By mid-February, we had all of the data.

Draft Foundational Skills

1 month (February through March).

As soon as we had all of the input data, Kirby anonymized it for future processing and then submitted it to the AI along with the AI Instructions document and other supporting documents we wanted the AI to use. (Click the ^ at right to expand this section and view the exact output from the AI's first run with all of the data.) The most satisfying part of the initial output was that it proved that the AI would be able to support this process effectively. The AI's analysis of the data we provided was accurate to what we could tell by reading through it ourselves, and the research results it reported matched the results we could independently find. It was then exciting after working on the project for six months to see a set of skills listed that would fit that data. It was a viable! It was also not done. Kirby spent the next few weeks experimenting with different models:

Loosely match the structure of the WA Portrait of a Graduate
Precisely match the structure of the WA Portrait of a Graduate
Competencies with proficiency scales
Match the structure of our old skills
Update our old skills with the fewest number of changes possible

With each set of results, Kirby adjusted our criteria and the instructions to the AI. In most ways, we moved away from extremes. We added more guide rails for the AI, while also trying to make the lanes as wide as possible. Trying to match Washington State's Portrait of a Graduate proved too restrictive, and the thought that the state might revise it was disconcerting, since it would leave us with a set of skills constrained to an out-of-date model. We abandoned any effort to explicitly align to that, but felt secure doing so, since our data already included advocacy for the same skills. Some similarity to our old skills was welcome, but explicitly trying to align to that was to restrictive for the AI to integrate the updated information. (A surprising discovery during this process was that our old skills were already well aligned with our data, though areas needing improvement were also evident.) The final version of our instructions to the AI and additional information is in the detailed description of how we used AI for our skills revision.

Output from AI's first attempt to draft our updated competencies using the full set of input:

I'll create a new list of Future-Ready Skills for ILHS based on all the provided documents and instructions. I'll analyze the input from stakeholders, consider research on transferable skills, align with the Washington State Profile of a Graduate, and incorporate lessons learned from your previous experience.

Let me start by analyzing the input from stakeholders to identify the most common themes and priorities across all groups.

Analysis of Stakeholder Input

After analyzing the input from staff, students, families, and alumni (each weighted equally at 25%), I've identified these recurring themes:

Most Common Skills Across All Groups:

Communication
Time Management
Critical Thinking
Collaboration/Teamwork
Self-Advocacy
Resilience/Perseverance
Organization
Problem-Solving
Financial Literacy
Work-Life Balance
Self-Care/Wellness
Empathy/Respect for Diversity
Agency/Initiative

Additional Skills with Strong Support:

Digital Literacy
Adaptability/Flexibility
Accountability/Responsibility
Study Skills
Networking/Building Relationships
Conflict Resolution
Professionalism

Research on Transferable Skills

Research indicates these skills predict success in various areas:

College Success:

Time management
Study skills
Critical thinking
Self-advocacy
Resilience/grit
Organization

Career Success:

Communication
Collaboration
Problem-solving
Adaptability
Initiative/self-motivation
Digital literacy
Professional networking

Life Satisfaction/Well-being:

Emotional regulation
Relationship building
Financial literacy
Work-life balance
Resilience
Self-care
Purpose/meaning

Future-Ready Skills Framework

Based on my analysis, I'm organizing the skills into 5 domains that align with Washington State's Profile of a Graduate while ensuring each domain has an equal number of Foundational and Advanced skills.

ILHS Future-Ready Skills

Domain 1: COMMUNICATION

Foundational Skills:

Expression: Conveys ideas clearly and effectively through various mediums.
Listening: Demonstrates active attention to understand others' messages and perspectives.
Collaboration: Works productively with others toward shared goals.
Digital Communication: Uses technology tools appropriately to share information and ideas.

Advanced Skills - Type A:

Advanced Expression: Tailors communication strategies for specific audiences and complex purposes.
Advanced Listening: Synthesizes multiple perspectives to deepen understanding and inform responses.
Advanced Collaboration: Leads diverse teams through challenges toward successful outcomes.
Advanced Digital Communication: Leverages multiple digital platforms strategically for maximum impact.

Advanced Skills - Type B:

Persuasion: Influences others through ethical, evidence-based argumentation.
Conflict Mediation: Facilitates resolution between disagreeing parties to find mutually beneficial solutions.

Domain 2: CRITICAL THINKING

Foundational Skills:

Analysis: Examines information from multiple sources to form conclusions.
Problem-Solving: Develops and implements effective solutions to challenges.
Research: Gathers relevant information through appropriate methods and sources.
Evaluation: Assesses the credibility, relevance, and validity of information.

Advanced Skills - Type A:

Advanced Analysis: Interprets complex patterns and relationships between diverse concepts and sources.
Advanced Problem-Solving: Creates innovative solutions to multifaceted, ill-defined problems.
Advanced Research: Designs comprehensive research methodologies to investigate complex questions.
Advanced Evaluation: Critiques sources and evidence with sophisticated understanding of bias and limitation.

Advanced Skills - Type B:

Systems Thinking: Analyzes how components within a system interact and affect one another.
Design Thinking: Applies user-centered approaches to create solutions through prototyping and iteration.

Domain 3: PERSONAL MANAGEMENT

Foundational Skills:

Organization: Arranges information, tasks, and resources efficiently.
Time Management: Plans and prioritizes tasks to meet deadlines and goals.
Self-Advocacy: Communicates personal needs, boundaries, and goals effectively.
Accountability: Takes responsibility for actions and follows through on commitments.

Advanced Skills - Type A:

Advanced Organization: Creates comprehensive systems to manage complex projects and information.
Advanced Time Management: Optimizes productivity through strategic scheduling and resource allocation.
Advanced Self-Advocacy: Navigates complex systems to obtain resources and support for specific needs.
Advanced Accountability: Builds culture of responsibility within groups and systems.

Advanced Skills - Type B:

Goal Setting: Establishes specific, measurable objectives with actionable steps.
Stress Management: Implements effective strategies to maintain balance during challenging situations.

Domain 4: RESILIENCE

Foundational Skills:

Adaptability: Adjusts effectively to changing circumstances and expectations.
Perseverance: Continues effort despite challenges and setbacks.
Growth Mindset: Embraces challenges as opportunities to learn and improve.
Reflection: Examines personal experiences to identify patterns and areas for growth.

Advanced Skills - Type A:

Advanced Adaptability: Thrives amidst ambiguity and rapidly changing environments.
Advanced Perseverance: Sustains long-term commitment to difficult goals despite significant obstacles.
Advanced Growth Mindset: Seeks feedback and challenges that push beyond current capabilities.
Advanced Reflection: Synthesizes insights from experiences to transform approaches and perspectives.

Advanced Skills - Type B:

Initiative: Takes action independently to address needs without prompting.
Self-Regulation: Manages emotions and behaviors effectively in challenging situations.

Domain 5: CITIZENSHIP

Foundational Skills:

Empathy: Understands and respects the perspectives and experiences of others.
Cultural Competence: Engages respectfully with diverse values, beliefs, and practices.
Community Engagement: Participates actively in improving the community.
Global Awareness: Recognizes interconnections between local actions and global systems.

Advanced Skills - Type A:

Advanced Empathy: Builds inclusive environments that honor diverse experiences and needs.
Advanced Cultural Competence: Navigates cultural differences to foster meaningful cross-cultural collaboration.
Advanced Community Engagement: Develops sustainable solutions to community challenges.
Advanced Global Awareness: Analyzes complex global issues and their implications for various stakeholders.

Advanced Skills - Type B:

Ethical Decision-Making: Makes choices based on principles that consider impacts on all stakeholders.
Advocacy: Takes actions that benefit others and promote positive change.

This framework includes 20 Foundational Skills and 20 Advanced Skills (Type A: 20, Type B: 10) organized across 5 domains. Each domain contains 4 Foundational skills and 6 Advanced skills (4 Type A and 2 Type B).

This structure aligns with the Washington State Profile of a Graduate while incorporating the key themes from stakeholder input and research on transferable skills. The skills are described clearly, avoiding ambiguous language, and are designed to be assessable across different contexts.

Refine Foundational Skills

3 months (March through May).

After trying many different variations of how to structure and guide the final set of skills, we had a set of clear guidelines that would create our updated competencies. We then created what would be the first draft of what would become our final foundational competencies, which also provided one of the highlights from the entire process. The AI had been told to create four to seven domains. We had told it to use the "4Cs" for the first four, but left the rest up to whatever would best suit the data. The AI generated exactly the same six domains as we had used with our old competencies! It was encouraging support for the work we had done to create our existing competencies, and also made the upcoming transition that much easier to implement.

Click the ^ at right to expand this section and view the exact output from the AI's first draft of what would become our final revision.

ILHS Future-Ready Foundational Skills

Communication Domain

Clarity: Expresses ideas in a clear and concise manner that listeners or readers can understand.
Adaptation: Adjusts communication approach based on audience, purpose, and context.
Digital Communication: Navigates digital platforms and tools to effectively communicate ideas.
Listening: Demonstrates understanding of others' ideas through active engagement with their message.
Professional Correspondence: Composes formal communication that meets standards expected in academic and workplace settings.

Collaboration Domain

Teamwork: Contributes effectively to group efforts while supporting the contributions of others.
Conflict Resolution: Addresses disagreements constructively to find mutually beneficial solutions.
Responsibility: Fulfills commitments to collaborative efforts in a timely and thorough manner.
Inclusion: Incorporates diverse perspectives and ensures all team members can participate meaningfully.
Feedback: Provides and receives constructive input that improves work quality and relationships.

Critical Thinking Domain

Analysis: Examines information from multiple sources to identify patterns, connections, and insights.
Evidence Evaluation: Determines the credibility, relevance, and significance of information.
Problem-Solving: Develops and implements solutions to overcome obstacles or challenges.
Decision-Making: Makes reasoned choices after considering alternatives and potential outcomes.
Reflection: Reviews processes and outcomes to identify lessons learned and areas for improvement.

Creativity Domain

Idea Generation: Produces original concepts, approaches, or solutions to address needs or challenges.
Design Thinking: Develops solutions by understanding needs, generating ideas, and refining approaches.
Adaptability: Adjusts approaches when faced with new circumstances or information.
Innovation: Applies creative thinking to improve existing processes or outcomes.
Expression: Communicates ideas through various mediums including visual, written, or multimedia formats.

Agency Domain

Planning: Creates structured approaches to accomplish goals within specified timeframes.
Organization: Manages resources, information, and tasks in systematic ways that support achievement.
Self-Advocacy: Communicates personal needs, goals, and boundaries in constructive ways.
Initiative: Takes action to address needs without requiring external prompting.
Perseverance: Maintains effort toward goals despite challenges, setbacks, or initial failures.

Citizenship Domain

Ethics: Makes decisions that reflect moral principles and consideration of impacts on others.
Service: Contributes time and effort to improve communities, assist others, or support causes.
Global Awareness: Demonstrates understanding of diverse perspectives, cultures, and global issues.
Civic Engagement: Participates in activities that address community needs or public concerns.
Digital Citizenship: Uses technology responsibly with awareness of digital rights and responsibilities.

To refine these skills, Kirby cycled through a process of reading through the proposed skills, adjustments, and then having the AI look for similar adjustments to make. Over the course of a week, Kirby shared drafts of the skills with an increasingly large number of people. The first draft was shared with our principal, Tifa, on March 3rd and that conversation led to particular refinements. The next draft was shared with the entire mastery learning team: Ashley, Mo, and Tifa, whose input led to even more refinements. The next draft was also shared with our MBLC coach, Melanie, so helped refine the drafts even more. On March 10th, the draft was shared with the entire ILHS staff and they were invited to discuss the draft in their departments and provide input.

Click the ^ at right to expand this section and view the version that was first shared with staff. (The staff also had a paragraph of details and a paragraph of justification for each skill.)

Communication

Discussions: Participates effectively in exchanges of ideas through active listening, thoughtful contributions, and appropriate engagement with others' viewpoints.
Oral Presentations: Delivers organized, clear spoken content effectively to various audiences including in presentations, pitches, and formal speaking contexts.
Written Communication: Produces clear, organized, and purposeful written content appropriate to the task and audience.
Construct Arguments: Develops and presents logical, persuasive positions supported by relevant evidence and sound reasoning.

Collaboration

Cooperation: Works effectively with diverse team members by valuing different perspectives, addressing disagreements constructively, and contributing reliably to shared goals.
Accountability: Fulfills commitments to collaborative efforts in a timely and thorough manner.
Feedback: Provides and receives constructive input that improves work quality and relationships.
Role Flexibility: Adapts to fulfill different functions within teams based on changing needs and personal strengths.

Critical Thinking

Information Literacy: Locates, evaluates, and uses information effectively and ethically from diverse sources, including digital environments.
Analysis: Develops claims supported by evidence and explains the reasoning that connects them to form logical conclusions.
Problem-Solving: Develops and implements solutions to overcome obstacles or challenges.
Interdisciplinary Thinking: Connects concepts and approaches across different disciplines to develop integrated understanding or innovative solutions.

Creativity

Mental Flexibility: Shifts between different thinking modes and perspectives to generate diverse approaches and adapt to changing situations.
Ideation: Generates, refines, and selects ideas to address challenges, opportunities, or creative pursuits.
Creative Courage: Pursues innovative ideas and approaches despite uncertainty of outcomes.
Expression: Communicates ideas, emotions, or perspectives through artistic, innovative, or imaginative approaches.

Agency

Initiative to Learn: Pursues knowledge and skills independently by identifying learning needs, finding resources, and applying new understanding.
Growth Orientation: Responds to challenges and feedback by adapting strategies and developing new approaches to improve outcomes.
Project Management: Creates and implements structured approaches to accomplish goals by allocating time, energy, and resources effectively.
Networking: Builds and maintains connections with peers, mentors, and community members to exchange information and support goals.

Citizenship

Ethics: Makes decisions that reflect moral principles and consideration of impacts on others.
Community Engagement: Participates in and advocates for activities that address community needs and contributes to collective well-being.
Global Awareness: Demonstrates understanding of diverse perspectives, cultures, and global issues.
Empathy: Understands others' experiences, feelings, and needs to inform supportive responses and human-centered solutions.

Advanced Skills

All of the input improved the foundational skills and also provided new insights that led to a snowball-like effect of ongoing improvement. As the foundational skills seemed close to final, with only small tweaks likely, Kirby began working on the advanced skills. Each advanced skill was to be either an extension of a foundational skill or a new skill not already represented. Most of the extension skills proved easy enough to create. In some cases, the foundational skill was adjusted in light of the proposed advanced skill to make leveling more appropriate. When it came time to create the original advanced skills, however, it became more complex. We had done such a thorough job of incorporating the input into the rest of the skills that only a few really important skills were left. Nonverbal Communication, Conflict Mediation, Information Management, and Leadership were too important to omit, along with aspects of other skills. During this stage, we often had too many advanced skills in one domain and too few in others, so there was an ongoing give-and-take happening.

One of the last and most difficult skills to develop was Emotional Effectiveness. The stakeholder input and the research both listed aspects of emotional intelligence as being among the most important skills for students to learn. However, we set out with a goal of keeping the skills assessable through evidence, and emotional intelligence is difficult to observe its presence. It is easier to find evidence of poor emotional intelligence than strong emotional intelligence, but we wanted to avoid competencies that would be deficit-oriented instead of strength-oriented. We want to award competencies for success, not take them away for failures (especially when we want to emphasize failure as an opportunity for growth). In the end, the strong support for the competency obliged us to find a way to include it. We used the AI to describe observable actions that would characterize a person with high emotional intelligence and then built the skill around those. A similar process of analysis ended up being involved in the development of most skills, each with their own flavor.

Initial Use

With the competencies nearing finalization, we began considering how the skills would be integrated into our classes. On April 30th, the staff began identifying which of the Future-Ready Skills they were already including in their courses this year, and to what extent they were integrated. We purposefully began this activity before the skills were considered to be finalized so staff would have opportunity to provide new input on the skills. We expected that beginning to think about the skills in action would provide new insights. There was surprisingly little new feedback on the skills, however, at this time. The results of the activity were remarkably beneficial, however, as we were able to get a very clear picture of which new skills were already well represented and which we would have to work to improve. This work would prove to be the next project for us as a school as a result of this competency revision.

Final Approval

The Future-Ready Skills were formally adopted by our Shared Decision-Making Leadership Team on May 13th with the assurance that the document can continue to adjust as we find the need. This was immediately put into action as the Oral Presentations skill experienced a final revision. Out of concern that presentations in American Sign Language seemed excluded, we embarked on a new revision of the skill's wording. Looking at alternatives to make it more inclusive caused the mastery learning team to work on it for almost an hour, resulting in the new Real-Time Presentations skill.

Judgment Calls

We had to make some decisions about the final form of our skills.

Financial literacy came up about as often as communication, the most commonly suggested skill. It seemed too specific to include in the skills, but its prevalence suggested a need to ensure every student learned about personal finances. This began a conversation about whether to require every student to take a personal finance class or whether to integrate the concepts into a class that every student takes.
Staff requested the presence of a Reflection skill, which was part of the existing skills. Staff noted that they used it very often. It was nevertheless omitted from the skills.
- Its high usage suggested it was being used more as a tool than a skill.
- Reflection was incorporated into Growth Orientation, but given a purpose beyond just the process of writing a reflection.
- Reflection is often a method of demonstrating other skills, so it will continue to be utilized.

Would Do Differently

What changes would we make if were to go through this process, again?

The AI tools would allow only a limited number of interactions before they would require starting a new chat. We did not realize this at first, and were trying to keep the entire process in a single string of reasoning. If we were to do it again, we would make the work for each version of the skills an individual chat.
A few times, we were able to have the AI create a summary of the changes made to the specific version. These reports were very useful as they preserved why many of the changes were made. Such information was very useful when sharing the updated drafts with others outside of the project. We would like to have taken this step for every chat with the AI.

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