The June 2026 Marzano Resources webinar on Portrait of a Graduate names what great graduates look like — and points clearly toward what it takes to get there. NextREADY GPS gives every student, educator, and family the practical tools to bring that vision home.
Ferdi Serim worked alongside Bob Marzano from 2010–2012 building the foundations for this work. NextREADY GPS is what that collaboration makes possible.
NextREADY GPS was built to cross all three — with the iCAN statement as the key that unlocks each one.
Every district that has worked through a Portrait of a Graduate process recognizes the same moment: the framework is beautiful, the competencies are approved — and then the hard question arrives. How do we actually measure this? How does it live in classrooms? NextREADY GPS is the answer to that question.
| The PoG vision | What stalls districts | How NextREADY GPS takes you there |
|---|---|---|
| A living graduate vision, not a wall poster | The PoG document is approved and printed. Teachers admire it and move on. Nothing changes in Monday's lesson. | The Capstone Journey Journal turns the PoG into live, student-owned evidence — updated continuously, not checked once at graduation. |
| Academic, cognitive, and metacognitive skills | Competency language that inspires — but can't be observed or measured in a classroom moment. | iCAN statements make every graduate capacity observable at the student level. Students author them in their own voice; educators and families can see exactly what growth looks like. |
| Students as whole human beings | Academic skills, social-emotional learning, and career readiness developed in separate silos that never quite connect. | The Hand of Learning and the Four Rs — Reasoning, Resilience, Resourcefulness, Relationships — integrate all three domains in one shared framework. No silos. |
| From vision to sustainable classroom practice | No feedback loop. Growth happens but no one can see it. Educators, families, and system leaders are all working from different pictures. | iCAN statements flow to educator dashboards, family milestone reports, and WIOA-compliant evidence records — closing the loop for every stakeholder at once. |
| College- and career-ready evidence | Graduate capacities that sound compelling but aren't connected to real careers — or the real regional labor market where students will actually work. | O*NET and MyNextMove integration connects every graduate capacity to actual careers within the region. A student in Hatch Valley, NM sees pathways that exist within 50 miles — not national averages. |
This short overview shows how Durable Life Skills connect to the Life Work Learning tree — and walks through a real graduate profile example from Albuquerque. It is the clearest demonstration of what the PoG vision looks like when it is actually working in a community.
Part 2 of the NextREADY GPS intro series · approx. 2.5 min
Marzano's models identify the academic, cognitive, and metacognitive capacities that define a great graduate. The hard part — the part every district struggles with — is turning that into something a student can hold, a teacher can see, and a family can understand.
The iCAN statement is that bridge. It is a first-person, student-authored declaration of competency — not rubric language translated down, not a teacher's observation of a student. It is the student's own voice, inside the framework, at the center of the evidence record.
Because iCAN statements are authored by the student and grounded in their actual experience, they are simultaneously a learning tool, an evidence artifact, and a portable credential. They travel from program to program, from K–12 through postsecondary, from WIOA case file to employer conversation.
Most PoG tools give students a framework to fill in. NextREADY GPS gives students real work to do — and the language to show what that work taught them.
Most PoG tools treat academic skills, social-emotional learning, and career readiness as parallel tracks that educators are asked to somehow connect on their own. The ASCEND framework — grounded in Indigenous pedagogical traditions, Cajete's natural education, and current cognitive science — treats them as a single integrated system from the start. The Hand of Learning connects head, heart, hands, and community. The Four Rs give every graduate capacity a metacognitive and interpersonal dimension that Marzano's models point toward and NextREADY GPS makes actionable.
The iCAN statement is the measurement tool. When a student authors "I can reason through a problem I've never seen before and explain my thinking to someone who wasn't in the room," that is a measurable, observable act — not an aspiration. The Capstone Journey Journal accumulates these statements as a living evidence record, growing across a student's K–12 journey and into postsecondary life.
The Family Portrait of a Graduate extends the PoG to bilingual family interfaces, milestone milestone communications, and reports families can actually read and act on. Families become active participants in the graduate vision — not passive recipients of a report card they didn't help shape. Eligible under WIOA Title I/II. No competing PoG tool offers this.
O*NET and MyNextMove integration connects each graduate capacity to actual careers in the region — not national averages. A student, educator, or family can see exactly how Reasoning, Resilience, and technical skills map to careers that exist within 50 miles. This is the college-and-career-ready evidence base that generic PoG frameworks aspire to but cannot provide.
A student's SkillsBank — their full iCAN portfolio — is portable. It follows them from program to program, from K–12 to community college, from training program to first employer conversation. No starting over at each transition. The graduate vision doesn't end at the ceremony; it becomes a living credential the student carries forward.
These lanes naturally reinforce each other. A district that enters through CTE eventually needs a whole-school PoG framework to sustain pathway alignment. A district that enters through PoG needs career pathway data to ground its graduate capacities. NextREADY GPS is the only platform that serves both conversations from a single coherent architecture — built on the same foundation Marzano's work points toward.
Whether you're aligning an existing framework, building from scratch, or looking to activate a PoG that's already approved — there's a NextREADY GPS pathway that fits where you are right now.