14° and Clear
Image
Image source: Westwood Public Schools. Westwood Public Schools will soon be rolling out student-designed graphics that summarize a long school community process of examining desired qualities of a WPS graduate.
9-23-2025 12:19am
WHS Students Help Design Portrait of a Graduate Report that Will Be Rolled Out, Districtwide
Darlene Cancell
Editor
Thanks to Westwood Public Schools for contributing this news to Westwood Minute.
When Westwood Superintendent of Schools Timothy Piwowar came to Westwood two years ago, he felt it was important to create a “Portrait of a Graduate” (POG) profile for the school district. A POG focuses on more than just academic achievement. It identifies the key life skills and competencies that a school district believes students should have upon graduating so they can thrive as young adults and beyond.
What makes Westwood’s POG unique is that the district asked four Westwood High School (WHS) students to help create the graphics for the report. The district held several sessions with educational consultants from master planning firm Dore+Whittier to discuss the content for each pillar that makes up a Portrait of a Graduate.
Once this work was completed the focus turned towards how to represent the information graphically,” said Michele Rogers, Senior Project Manager with Dore+Whittier. ”After a few meetings with mostly adults in the room, it was suggested that a few high school students might want to participate. They came in with an incredibly different and quite creative point of view.”
The four students spent most of this summer working as interns on the project. Rogers says her team has worked on many POG projects, but this is the first time students got involved as interns and earned ownership of the design phase.
“We created mood boards, drafted poster concepts, organized ideas and goals and ultimately developed a cohesive final design that could represent the full range of students,” said WHS senior Gabrielle Hennessey. “I’m proud of the final design because it not only reflects our creative process, but also the teamwork that made it possible.”
The students decided that the graphics should represent their journey through school—from preschool to high school graduation. Hennessey and Class of 2025 graduate Terris Jones came up with the idea to use writing utensils to represent this journey. The students started with crayons to depict their earliest years and then progressed to pencils, pens and highlighters.
Image source: Westwood Public Schools. The Portrait of a Graduate provides the Westwood Public Schools community with a focus for the district's educational efforts - supporting students who graduate with communication and creativity skills, critical thinking, integrity, and who will be engaged locally and globally.“We selected the utensils based on their fundamental characteristics and then gave them symbolic meaning,” said Hennessey. “For example, the pen represents acting with integrity, because its marks are permanent, just like our actions.”
“Since it is intended for the entire school audience, we wanted it to be approachable to all grades and all levels of comprehension and look open and inviting,” said WHS graduate Sarahluna Sassine, who is now a freshman at Harvard. “I’m so happy and proud of it. This was my first time working on a team for a visual project and on something that’s going to have such a lasting impact on the district.”
“There are obviously different ways you can communicate what the goal of the Portrait of a Graduate is,” said Dore+Whittier associate Jason Harris. “Parents and administrators will see something one way and students will interpret it differently. We really wanted the design to come from the student’s perspective so that students identify with the graphics.”
“This project gave students another way to work collaboratively and creatively,” said Piwowar. “The fact that their work is long-lasting and will be viewed by countless students, educators, and community members for years to come is something they should be very proud of.”
The Portrait of a Graduate report was presented to the School Committee in mid-September, and the graphics will now go into production where they will be displayed in all of the schools across the district.
