The Great Falls Public Schools district is developing a “profile of a learner” through a community-wide process.

Heather Hoyer, who assumes the role of superintendent July 1, said the district has been working on the process for the last year and has another year to complete it under new state accreditation requirements.

The district opened a community survey this week that will accept responses through June 21.

Hoyer said the concept of “profile of a graduate” has been adopted by school districts nationwide and last year, Montana joined that trend by requiring it for district accreditation requirements.

She said GFPS decided to call theirs “profile of a learner” so it didn’t get wrapped up in the end game of graduation, but was more encompassing of the learning process.

GFPS graduation rate improves slightly

She said the Montana Office of Public Instruction isn’t developing their own profile, indicating to districts that they’d prefer local control and have districts develop processes that work best for them.

Hoyer said the process has run the gamut statewide, with some being developing by staff internally to the GFPS effort for community collaboration.

The profile is meant to include skills, traits and characteristics in addition to academics that graduates will need to be successful in the future.

GFPS officials wanted to take advantage of community conversations and input to make that profile more meaningful and they plan to integrate it into the curriculum and other programs, Hoyer said.

GFPS’ CORE School filling up after student lottery

During the last year, district officials worked to define what learning is, looking at past, current and potential future concepts of learning.

From that, they identified 29 skills, traits and characteristics that graduates should possess for future success, Hoyer said, but that’s too many for anyone to really get their head around, so the survey is asking the community to help narrow that list to five, though there’s an option to add skills not listed.

[Take the survey here]

The conversations over the last year involved district leadership, building administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents and community members, Hoyer said.

After the community survey is complete and the top five skills or characteristics are identified, Hoyer said they’ll be developed into a graphic that will be used internally in strategic planning, curriculum development, Character Strong programs and more.

GFPS, foundation working to update elementary school playgrounds

As educators, Hoyer said they think about teaching knowledge, but also soft skills such as listening, communication, collaboration, self management, that students will need after graduation and will incorporate those into the teaching process.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Hoyer said there were 345 responses to the community survey and her goal was 500.

Of those, many were parents and guardians; there were some from business owners and the faith community; and 32 percent came from military members, their spouses or dependents, she said.

The leading trait was strong communication skills, she said.