POG

Portrait of a Graduate — Making Growth Visible

The education industry is shifting toward Agency-Based Learning (ABL), where students are no longer passive recipients of grades but active owners of their growth data.

That’s why I value my work with Dr. Shi at Learning Genie.

Learning Genie's Portrait of a Graduate (PoG) tool makes that shift concrete. By providing clear targets and rubric-aligned feedback, it turns the abstract ‘Learner Profile’ into a series of achievable milestones and badges. The platform captures multi-modal proof, including videos, reflections, and work samples, which allows students to curate a rich portfolio that serves as a tangible record of their own agency and development.

In practice, this means a student has evidence of who they are becoming as a learner, visible to them, to their teachers, and to their families. It becomes their story!

AI Literacy Built Into the Platform

Curriculum Genie integrates AI literacy courses directly into the platform, supporting educators with the tools to make personalized, future-focused learning a reality rather than just an aspiration.

This is significant because students aren't just using AI; they are learning to use it responsibly and critically. That's a competency that every graduate is going to need — and most schools aren't yet teaching systematically.

What This Looks Like in a Classroom

Picture a 7th-grade class studying environmental science. In a traditional model, the teacher delivers a unit, students complete the same tasks, and a test at the end sorts who got it.

In a Learning Genie ABL classroom, it looks like this:

The teacher opens Curriculum Genie, inputs the standard and the local context ~ for example, water quality issues in their own community and within minutes has a full unit with differentiated pathways, culturally responsive examples, embedded formative assessments, and student choice menus. Because the unit is location-based, the examples, activities, and cultural connections align with the local environment — making lessons authentic and relatable for every student in the room.

Students then engage with the unit not as recipients, but as investigators. They choose how to demonstrate their understanding ~ a video, a written reflection, a community presentation. Each artifact gets tagged to a Portrait of a Graduate competency. Over time, students can look at their portfolio and see not just what they learned, but how they grew.

Students naturally interact with AI. ABL channels this fluency for deep learning rather than passive consumption. The student who once scrolled through a feed is now using AI to research, draft, question, and refine with a teacher alongside them as a coach, not a gatekeeper.

What Leadership Needs to Do

Here is the honest truth: tools like Learning Genie only fulfill their promise when leadership creates the conditions for them to work.

That means investing in professional learning that is supported through coaching on what it actually looks like to release control to students in productive ways. This is the opposite of the traditional one-day drive-by PD that teachers so often experience.

Educators in schools that have adopted ABL emphasize starting small, trusting students' natural curiosity, and allowing the shift from teacher-led instruction to student co-creation to happen gradually, with joy as a signal that it's working.

It means building schedules that allow for inquiry, choice, and reflection rather than just coverage.

Finally, it means redefining what accountability looks like in your buildings. When students become active owners of their own growth data rather than passive recipients of grades, accountability shifts from something administered to something internalized. That's the goal. And it requires leadership to model the belief that students are capable of it.

The Double Helix and Learning Genie's ABL platform are built on the same conviction: that when the system is designed well and when adults are precise, students are empowered, and AI is used with intention so every learner can thrive.

That's not a theory. That's a design choice. And it starts with you.