Educator Essentials & Core Values
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At Portland Public Schools, every employee is an educator. A school district is a community of adults that supports student learning in various ways. After all, despite doing different jobs, we share a common goal of delivering graduates that are prepared to thrive in their lives and career.
Our Vision: A graduate of Portland Public Schools will be a compassionate critical thinker, able to collaborate and solve problems and prepared to lead a more socially just world.
For this to vision to be realized, the adults supporting students must model a specific set of attributes we call the Educator Essentials. Furthermore, it’s not just what we do, it’s how we do it. Subsequently, we’ve captured our beliefs in Core Values to guide action toward our vision.
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Educator Essentials
The attributes – knowledge, skills, mindsets, and dispositions - needed from adults to support the Graduate Portrait.
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Consistent and Reliable
PPS adults are trustworthy, reliable, and courageous allies. Each adult is approachable and is someone whom every student, family member, and colleague can count on because they follow through with their responsibilities consistently and hold themselves and others accountable. They have consistently high expectations and levels of preparedness so they can best respond to the needs of the students in front of them.
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Knowledgeable and Committed to Lifelong Learning
PPS adults are highly competent in their areas of practice. Those engaged in instruction are also skilled in a variety of evidence-based, engaging teaching approaches, including strategies for social-emotional, culturally-responsive academic learning. Adults are proactive about keeping their professional knowledge up-to-date and even anticipating future trends in their fields, and contributing to innovations and best practices in their schools and departments. They are committed to using a range of tools, including current and emerging technologies and data to inform continuous improvement of practice, collaborate with colleagues throughout the system, and support diverse learners.
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Racial Equity and Social Justice Centered
PPS adults are courageous change agents who actively promote and ensure racial equity and social justice. They understand that the perceived reality, based on the dominant culture, has often excluded the perspectives of people of color. They understand that they can replace the narrative with a more inclusive and objective multi-cultural approach that contributes to the positive identity development of adults and students of color.
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Inclusive and Responsive to Diverse Learners
PPS adults respect, understand, and adapt to the unique cultural, linguistic, and special needs of our diverse learners. The adults are mindful of who our students are and are aware of students’ unique needs as they design and conduct their daily work. They adopt a growth mindset—seeing all students’ capacities as growing and developing, not fixed. They are deeply familiar with a variety of inclusive practices, along with culturally and linguistically responsive teaching strategies. Adults see their own diversity and that of our students and families as assets that support learning and as gifts that enrich both the school district’s culture and the community.
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Community-minded, Connected, and Collaborative
PPS adults understand, respect, and appreciate the communities they serve. They cultivate deep relationships with students, families, and community members. They are eager collaborators, willing to reach beyond school-based resources and connect community members with students and each other. They are team players who are both leaders and followers, sensitive to and willing to rise to the needs of the moment. They are constantly looking for allies and partners to help create positive outcomes for students. They live the belief that “none of us knows everything, but together we know a lot.”
PPS adults are self-aware and knowledgeable as to their own strengths and biases, and they have a positive sense of their own identity. They are reflective about their own areas of growth, enabling them to practice continuous improvement and lifelong learning. They recognize vulnerability as a strength, are open to feedback from peers and mentors, and have high social-emotional intelligence, enabling them to create emotionally safe spaces for students, families, and peers.
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Innovative, Global, and Pragmatic
PPS adults are curious and future-focused leaders. They understand a variety of leadership models from various cultures and can “lead from any seat.” They are committed, creative problem- solvers who develop and implement solutions that are assessed thoughtfully and that balance risk and results. They are capable of being both locally minded and globally oriented to collaborate with others in addressing challenges. Along with these collaborations, they model a global orientation for their students by speaking more than one language and being knowledgeable about other cultures.
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Caring, Empathetic, and Relational
PPS adults demonstrate care for students and families and are enthusiastic about building personal relationships. They hold a strengths-based view (recognizing and encouraging strengths rather than focusing solely on deficits) of every person at PPS and are particularly attentive to the needs
of our most vulnerable students. They are dedicated to implementing strategies to develop and/or support each student’s skills and talents. They inspire learning and are willing and able to facilitate difficult conversations that show empathy across wide-ranging student and family experiences.
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Adaptive, Resilient, and Open to Change
PPS adults honor culture and traditions while being open to change. Each person supports this openness by understanding that failure, multiple attempts, and iteration are necessary, if not critical, parts of continuous learning. They demonstrate a commitment to continuous improvement by developing the skills and persistence to shift the system and structures around them when necessary and build their own resilience through self-care, and collaboration with students, educators, and others.
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Core Values
The organization’s enduring beliefs that guide action toward a collective vision.
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Students at the Center
We believe that all students have the ability to succeed and that positive impacts on students are at the center of each decision and action. We believe that student voice is essential to understanding and solving the core issues of education and that including student voice is a priority.
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Racial Equity and Social Justice
We believe in the fundamental right to human dignity and that generating an equitable world requires an educational system that intentionally disrupts—and builds leaders to disrupt—systems of oppression.
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Honesty and Integrity
We believe in demonstrating honesty and integrity in every action we take, with sincere, ethical, transparent, and accountable communication and decision making in service of our students, families, staff, and community.
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Excellence
We believe in rigor and high standards for all students and staff, and that achieving excellence and high performance is the result of the school system acting as a continuous learning organization.
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Respect
We believe in respect for all. Every person brings value and deserves to be treated with care, courtesy, and compassion.
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Relationships
We believe that relationships are vital to our success. Authentic human connection, established through kind, caring relationships, builds trust, fosters understanding, and strengthens our ability to work together toward shared aspirations.
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Creativity and Innovation
We believe in the power of effective problem solving, supported by a culture of creativity and innovation. Challenging assumptions, nurturing curiosity, welcoming new ideas, and developing lateral thinking skills are essential to developing effective strategies for constructive change.
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Partnerships and Collaboration
We believe that together, we know and can achieve a great deal, and that by leveraging the collective actions of a group of committed stakeholders, we can achieve our Vision.
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Grounded in the Spirit of Portland
We believe that our unique Portland identity gives us the collective wisdom to acknowledge and learn from our community’s diverse history and fuel our progress toward a new era of courageous and innovative collective action to create a better Portland for all.
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Joyful Learning and Leadership
We believe in learning and leading in ways that foster human connection, deep appreciation for each other, satisfaction in our work, and appreciation of the learning process