Most portrait frameworks stop at the attribute. North Carolina is the exception, and its rubrics are the most complete public example in the country. Below are the real criteria North Carolina uses for critical thinking, communication, and collaboration, an honest account of where creativity rubrics currently stand, and a method for crosswalking attributes to standards you already teach. For which attributes states and districts have chosen, see what a Portrait of a Graduate is. This page is about how they are measured. New York districts working to the state framework should start with the New York State Portrait of a Graduate implementation guide.
Every rubric described on this page is a real published rubric. The criteria and performance levels are from North Carolina’s statewide Portrait of a Graduate Durable Skills rubrics, and each section links to the source document so you can download the full performance descriptors from NC DPI directly.
What Is a Portrait of a Graduate Rubric?
A Portrait of a Graduate rubric is a competency rubric that defines what one attribute of a graduate profile looks like at different levels of performance. It answers the question the portrait itself leaves open: how would an observer know a student is a critical thinker, and how would they tell a student who is approaching that from one who has reached it? The most complete public example is North Carolina, and its Portrait of a Graduate resources are the reference set for this page.
North Carolina published a rubric for each of its seven durable skills in August 2023: adaptability, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, empathy, learner’s mindset, and personal responsibility. Each skill has a separate rubric for four grade bands, K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12, which makes 28 rubrics in total. They were developed by a team of more than 120 North Carolina educators, with the wider Portrait informed by roughly 1,200 stakeholders including the state Chamber of Commerce, the Community College System, and myFutureNC.
Two design decisions in that work are worth copying. First, the student-facing “I Can” statements are derived from the rubrics rather than written separately, so the language a student uses to self-assess and the language a teacher uses to judge describe the same behaviors. Second, NC DPI states the rubrics are built primarily for formative assessment, and advises teachers to focus on two or three criteria from one skill in a single unit. That is the difference between a rubric that gets used and one that gets filed.
How a Portrait of a Graduate Rubric Is Structured
A Portrait of a Graduate rubric has four structural layers: the durable skill, the criteria inside it, the performance levels, and the performance descriptors that fill each cell. North Carolina names those layers explicitly in every rubric document, and its communication rubric shows the full pattern on one page.
North Carolina uses three performance levels rather than the four many districts assume. Approaching Expectations covers performance short of proficiency, Meeting Expectations is the proficient level, and Exceeding Expectations covers work that is exemplary and goes beyond proficiency. Three levels is a deliberate choice: it forces a clear proficiency line and removes the middle band where scorers usually disagree.
One further detail makes the set unusually practical. NC DPI states each rubric can carry more than one kind of judgment: student self-assessment, peer assessment, and teacher assessment for feedback or for showing progress within a performance task. The same instrument therefore supports the student reflecting, a classmate responding, and a teacher recording, which removes the need for three parallel tools and keeps everyone describing performance in the same words.
Each skill also opens with a definition written as a list of graduate behaviors. North Carolina defines communication, for example, around articulating ideas across oral, written, and nonverbal modes, listening for meaning and intent, questioning to reach understanding, handling disagreement productively, adapting to purpose and audience, and using storytelling and public speaking. Those six statements are what the criteria are then built to assess, and writing the definition before the criteria is the step most districts skip.
Critical Thinking Rubric Example
North Carolina’s critical thinking rubric is organized around four criteria, and they follow the shape of an actual inquiry rather than a list of thinking verbs. The criteria below are taken from the grades 3-5 critical thinking I Can statements, which NC DPI derives directly from the rubric of the same name.
Note what the four criteria do together. Research and reasoning are separated, so a student who gathers well but concludes poorly is visible rather than averaged out. Solution finding sits apart from justification, which distinguishes choosing a course of action from defending it. Districts that collapse critical thinking into a single scale lose exactly those distinctions, and they are the ones a teacher can act on.
For districts outside North Carolina, these four criteria transfer directly onto a differently named attribute. A New York district assessing A Critical Thinker can adopt the same four and keep its own attribute label, because the criteria describe the underlying inquiry rather than the state that published them. That is generally the fastest legitimate route to a rubric: borrow the criteria structure from a state that has done the work, and keep your own community’s attribute names.
The progression across grade bands is where the rubric set earns its length. The same four criteria appear from K-2 to 9-12, but the descriptors change: what counts as evaluating a source in grade 4 is not what counts in grade 11. That is why North Carolina publishes four rubrics per skill rather than one with age-neutral wording, and it is the single most useful structural lesson for a district writing its own.
Communication Rubric Example
North Carolina’s communication rubric assesses dialogue and revision alongside presentation, which is unusual and is the reason it is worth studying. The criteria below are the grades K-2 set, taken from the published communication rubric; the criteria are revised for each higher grade band.
The feedback criterion is the one most districts leave out, and it carries real weight. A rubric that assesses only presentation measures performance skill. Adding a criterion on giving and receiving feedback makes revision assessable, which is what turns communication from an event into a practice. It is also the criterion that most naturally generates portfolio evidence, because a revised draft and the feedback that prompted it are both artifacts.
Notice the compression between definition and criteria. North Carolina defines communication with six graduate behaviors but assesses it with three criteria, so the criteria each carry more than one behavior: adapting to purpose and audience, for instance, is judged inside presenting rather than given a row of its own. That is a deliberate tradeoff in favor of a rubric a teacher will actually use, and it is worth understanding before a district decides to give every behavior its own criterion and ends up with a twelve-row instrument nobody completes.
One thing to watch when adapting this rubric. The level of assistance a student needs is built into the descriptors, moving from significant, to moderate, to minimal. That is a defensible way to describe growth, but it requires an assessor who saw the process, not just the product. If a district plans to judge communication from submitted work alone, the feedback criterion needs rewriting around visible evidence of revision instead.
Creativity and Innovation Rubrics: Where They Actually Stand
Several frameworks do name it: New York has A Creative Innovator among its six attributes, Kentucky has Creative Contributor, and Fairfax County Public Schools has Creative and Critical Thinker.
North Carolina’s adaptability rubric, built around agility, responding to feedback, and inclusiveness, covers a meaningful part of what creativity frameworks describe, and its learner’s mindset rubric covers more.
Collaboration Rubric Example
North Carolina’s collaboration rubric splits the skill into four criteria, and notably it assesses the team as well as the individual. The criteria below come from the grades 3-5 collaboration I Can statements, derived from the rubric of the same name.
The word consistently is doing deliberate work in the fourth criterion. Collaboration judged from a single group task measures one week; judged for consistency it measures a disposition, which is what a portrait actually claims about a graduate. That has a direct consequence for evidence: this criterion cannot be scored from a finished group product, and needs interim records gathered while the work is happening.
The four criteria also separate two things districts routinely conflate: whether a student is useful to a team, and whether a student is reliable. Roles and Cooperation cover usefulness, meaning what the student contributes and how they handle friction. Productivity and Accountability covers reliability, meaning preparation and delivery on time. A student can be strong on one and weak on the other, and the distinction matters because they call for entirely different interventions.
The Agreements criterion is worth noting too, because it is the only one on the page written for a team rather than a student. A district adapting this rubric has to decide how a team-level judgment is recorded against individual students, and the honest options are to record it as context rather than score, or to pair it with an individual reflection on how the agreements were reached.
How to Crosswalk Attributes to Existing Standards
A Portrait of a Graduate crosswalk maps where each attribute is already taught and assessed inside existing standards, courses, and tasks. Build it before designing anything new. Most districts find much of their attribute coverage already exists in work they run, and the crosswalk turns the portrait from an added program into a lens on the current one.
Map at the criterion level, never the attribute level. A Critical Thinker cannot be matched to a standard, but evaluating evidence maps cleanly onto argument writing, scientific investigation, and source analysis in history. Working from the criteria is what makes the exercise usable.
A five-step method that fits inside one department meeting:
- List the criteria for one attribute, straight from the rubric. Four or five items, not the attribute label.
- Pull the verbs from the standards each department already teaches. Analyze, evaluate, cite, construct, justify, critique, and revise matter most.
- Match on cognitive demand, not topic. A criterion about weighing evidence matches a standard that requires weighing evidence, whatever the subject matter.
- Name the task that already produces the evidence. A standard taught but generating no artifact is theoretical coverage, and should be marked as such.
- Rate coverage as strong, thin, or absent. Absent criteria are the only place new task design is needed.
A worked fragment shows the shape. For evaluating evidence, an ELA argument-writing standard already requires students to weigh claims and counterclaims and produces an argumentative essay: strong coverage. A science investigation standard requires students to judge their own data’s reliability and produces a lab report: also strong. A criterion about transfer to an unfamiliar domain typically matches nothing, which is exactly the gap a capstone or interdisciplinary task is worth building for.
Two warnings. First, do not crosswalk everything at once. One attribute per term, one department at a time, produces a document people use; a full matrix produces a compliance artifact nobody reads. Second, coverage is not attainment. NC DPI Suggestions for Use guide is explicit that durable skills are used in an integrated way and that teachers should narrow focus to a few criteria at a time. As the National Association of State Boards of Education has argued, naming the skills is not enough; systems need ways to teach, assess, and credential them.
How Districts Collect the Evidence a Rubric Needs
A rubric is only as good as the student work it is applied to, so collection has to be designed alongside the rubric rather than after it. The criteria above each require a specific kind of artifact: drafts and version histories for creativity, interim entries and a recorded condition for collaboration, and a recorded response to questioning for communication. Deciding which task produces which artifact is covered in building student portfolios from K to 12.
Reliability needs deliberate structure too. Schools in the New York Performance Standards Consortium apply network-wide scoring guides, run school-based moderation led by staff who attended network-wide moderation, and blind re-score samples of work to check both scorer consistency and the difficulty of the tasks teachers set. A lighter version works for most districts: score a sample in pairs, resolve differences against the descriptors rather than by compromise, and keep a few anchor pieces per level.
Then the practical constraint. Criteria such as transfer and iteration are judged over time, so the evidence has to survive the year it was created and follow the student across teachers. Somewhere, durability and attribute-tagging are prerequisites rather than refinements, which is what student digital portfolios are for.
From Rubric to Record
North Carolina publishes all 28 rubrics, and adapting them is the easy part. What determines whether they produce anything a district can act on is whether student work consistently reaches them, tagged to the attribute it evidences, across four years and several teachers. A rubric with no record behind it measures one lesson. For the wider argument about why systems are moving toward this kind of measurement, see how graduate profiles are changing what schools measure.
Sources
- North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, Portrait of a Graduate: seven durable skills (adaptability, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, empathy, learner’s mindset, personal responsibility); rubrics, I Can statements, Suggestions for Use, performance tasks, playbook, communications toolkit, and professional learning modules; Portrait revealed October 2022 with roughly 1,200 stakeholders; classroom resources published August 2023. dpi.nc.gov/districts-schools/operation-polaris/portrait-graduate
- NC DPI, Communication Rubric, Grades K-2: rubric structure of criteria, performance levels, and performance descriptors; the three performance levels Approaching, Meeting, and Exceeding Expectations, defined around a single proficiency line; the six graduate behaviors defining communication; criteria Engaging in Conversations, Giving and Receiving Feedback, and Presenting Knowledge and Ideas; rubrics designed primarily for formative assessment and usable for self, peer, and teacher assessment. dpi.nc.gov/documents/pog-communication-rubric-grades-k-2
- NC DPI, Critical Thinking I Can Statements, Grades 3-5: criteria Information, Discovery, and Research; Reasoning, Analysis, and Interpretation; Solution Finding; and Justification, derived from the critical thinking rubric. dpi.nc.gov/documents/pog-critical-thinking-i-can-statements-grades-3-5
- NC DPI, Collaboration I Can Statements, Grades 3-5: criteria Agreements, Roles, Cooperation, and Productivity and Accountability, derived from the collaboration rubric; the Agreements criterion written at team level. dpi.nc.gov/documents/pog-collaboration-i-can-statements-grades-3-5
- NC DPI, Durable Skills Rubrics: Suggestions for Use, August 2023: rubrics span grade bands K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 for each durable skill; developed by more than 120 North Carolina educators; guidance to focus on two or three criteria of one skill per unit; I Can statements derived from the rubrics; T-charts; district spotlights on Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools and Mooresville Graded School District; culminating reflection structures including deeper learning performance tasks, capstone projects, and portfolio exhibitions. dpi.nc.gov/documents/pog-rubrics-suggestions-use-guide
- NC DPI, Adaptability I Can Statements, Grades K-2: criteria Agility, Responding to Feedback, and Inclusiveness. dpi.nc.gov
- New York State Education Department: six attributes including A Creative Innovator, adopted by the Board of Regents July 2025; implementation guidance and rubrics expected by summer 2027. nysed.gov
- Kentucky Department of Education: Portrait of a Learner including Creative Contributor. education.ky.gov
- Fairfax County Public Schools: Portrait of a Graduate including Creative and Critical Thinker, adopted 2014. fcps.edu
- New York Performance Standards Consortium: network-wide scoring guides; school-based and network-wide moderation; blind re-scoring of samples to check scorer reliability and task difficulty. performanceassessment.org
- National Association of State Boards of Education, Turning Graduate Portraits into Pathways: the argument that naming durable skills is insufficient without ways to teach, assess, and credential them. nasbe.org
