POG, or Portrait of a Graduate, is a new initiative integrated into the Durango 9-R school district. It is meant to help students prepare for the outside world and their senior year. However, many students don’t know why the POG is a requirement or, specifically, why juniors give their POG capstone presentations.
Mason Phillips and Nolan Pace are both juniors who are about to give or have already given their POG Capstone presentations. The presentation comprises different projects or events from your high school career and the different traits of POG. Mason knows what POG is supposed to be, preparing graduates for graduation by teaching them traits that graduates need. But Nolan doesn’t really know anything about POG other than that juniors have to give a presentation at the end of the year to their advisory class. But he speculates that the purpose of POG is to make juniors reflect on their own actions over our high career and have an understanding of what school has done to help us as students.
Dylan Connell, the Chief Academic Officer for the 9R School District, had a huge role in creating the Portrait of a Graduate. The overall intention of the POG is to be “a promise to our learners that we are going to get you ready for the big wide world out there after graduation,” said Connell. Connell emphasizes the idea of Ikigai, a Japanese term that refers to having a sense of purpose in life and the motivation behind that purpose. Some of the ideas of ikigai are centered around answering these questions: What do I love to do and am passionate about, what am I good at, what impact do I want to make on the world, and what could I do to make a living while doing these things?
Connell was part of a group that asked civic leaders in our community, “What are the skills that are most important for students to graduate with for their future in the workplace?”
The culmination of this project requires a presentation at the end of each student’s junior year of high school. The administration feels that a presentation at the end of the junior year helps students enter their senior year with the necessary skills to launch them into the future, whether they are entering college, starting trade school, or whatever their future may hold.
If high school students can gain a vision for the future and understand the journey of their academic career through the POG process, then it’s easier to understand what the next step in life might be. It’s always easier to focus on the task at hand if you can see the big picture.
