The Essential Skills are overarching competencies identified within the North Dakota Portrait of a Graduate and unveiled by Governor Burgum during the 2021 Summit on Innovative Education to support alternate pathways to graduation. The Portrait of a Graduate framework serves as a guide and focuses on seven attributes critical to ensuring graduates are prepared for a career, college and community: critical thinking, communication, empathy, collaboration, learner’s mindset, adaptability, and perseverance.
The Essential Skills competencies are also present in the North Dakota Learning Continuum which is a statewide framework (document) identifying key qualities (attributes) within a set of learning expectations (competencies). This framework indicates the performance level that students participating in a proficiency or mastery-based learning model should know and be able to demonstrate over their K-12 career and beyond.
The resources on this website were created by North Dakota teachers for North Dakota teachers. State workgroups representing public, private, and tribal schools, and higher education institutions collaborated with the Regional Education Associations (CREA, NESC and SEEC) to draft a collection of documents that can serve as a foundation for a guaranteed and viable curriculum.
Each North Dakota Essential Skills proficiency scale details a learning progression aligned to a competency, with the proficiency expectation represented as score 3.0 within the scale. Scales outline the simple (foundational knowledge and skills), target, and complex learning for all grade spans, K-12.
To further support the implementation of scales in the classroom and student involvement in the learning and assessment processes, our work groups created aligned, student-friendly scales. During development, format, function, and language considerations were made for students across grades K-12 while maintaining direct content and skill alignment to the teacher versions.