As one of the first initiatives of Maret’s new strategic plan, Advancing with Purpose, a dynamic committee of faculty, students, Board members, and alumni came together during the 2025-2026 school year to identify and describe what is most essential to a Maret education. The resulting “portrait of a graduate” articulates the traits and skills the school strives to develop in students throughout their journey, starting in kindergarten and continuing through senior year. 

The entire faculty was engaged in the process of developing the portrait, ensuring its alignment with Maret’s mission, educational philosophy, and program. When the portrait was unveiled to the full faculty in the spring of 2026, the three students from the Class of 2026 who served on the committee shared ways that the portrait reflected their experience at Maret. They spoke passionately about specific ways their teachers and coaches nurtured joy in learning, helped them find clarity amidst complexity, and solve problems with humility, integrity, and courage. 

 

Assistant Head of School for Curriculum Development Maria López and Mike Matthews from Authentic Education guided this important work. Their inclusive, year-long process brought the full committee together for two days of workshops and then engaged a smaller committee to draft the final document. An analysis of initial faculty input and a review of the school’s foundational documents launched the process. Discussions and activities designed to hone the committee’s thinking followed, along with a mid-process check-in with the faculty, and final wordsmithing to capture the essence of their thinking. 

The outcome is a portrait of a graduate that the entire community is embracing as the school continues to roll it out to students, families, and alumni.

Portrait of a Graduate in Action

Enthusiastic faculty members have shared stories illustrating the ways in which the skills and traits of the portrait of a graduate are developed in their curriculum and classroom practices. Here are just a few examples:

Joyful Learner
“Lower schoolers embrace opportunities in the Community Engagement program to learn from others and reflect on the impact of their actions. Highlights include the MLK Day activities and the video-pal exchange with Life Pieces to Masterpieces.” 

“Seventh grade science projects are all exploration based, tied to the scientific method and the engineering design process, and connected to real-world problems or phenomena. Students design and build musical instruments to demonstrate their understanding of sound waves, build and program Lego SPIKE robots to complete assigned tasks, construct roller coasters to demonstrate their understanding of energy and energy transfer, then create a Rube Goldberg contraption that synthesizes the year’s learning. Creativity, active problem solving, and collaboration bring many joyful moments.”

“In the US humanities elective The Globalization We Have, students role-play different teams of advisors to Anatoly Chubais, a senior official in Boris Yeltsin's government, in order to more fully understand the conditions and predicaments of Russia in the 1990s. The simulation helps them wrap their heads around how Soviet socialism had collapsed, oligarchs had begun to emerge, most Russians were experiencing economic hardship, the fledgling democracy was struggling, and Western globalization was profoundly influencing the country."

Insightful Creators
“Students in Religion, Power, and Social Change do a found poetry project, which asks them to pick a primary source from the course and use the poetic technique to locate obscured voices, implicit meaning, or unsaid ideas. This often requires prolonged sitting with the text, re-reading until those latent patterns begin to emerge. The final products are often quite beautiful.”

“Each fall, my Performance Studies class watches a production that has historical and meaningful themes in our society (i.e The Crucible, Come from Away, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci). We talk about the way the performing arts can help us make 'sense of our world' and also see patterns in our past. These examinations inform original performance projects by the students as they are given the opportunity to explore a topic or issue on a deeper level by creating a new work.”

Ethical Problem Solver
“The eighth grade Climate Conference challenges students to confront the issue of climate change and how it impacts different populations and regions in different ways. In doing so, they practice empathy, evaluate data, and propose solutions to equitably address the issues.”

“In the Civil Liberties elective, students engage in a Voting and Electoral Reform Project where they work in teams to identify challenges that the current voting and electoral system faces in the United States, and then they do a deep dive into one of these issues to explore both the nature of the problem and possible solutions.”

Authentic Communicators
“This is something that we stress in PE. How can we communicate with our team so we have the best outcome? If our team is winning or losing, how can we rally everyone together to keep pushing hard? If someone makes a mistake, how can we be leaders and talk through what the mistake was and how we can fix it, rather than getting upset and not saying anything?”

“Students participating in the Maret in Conversation Podcast share their stories, their understandings, and their experiences to connect with others and contribute to a more open, respectful, and curious community. Some podcasts are meant to share experiences, while others are meant to surface different perspectives, but both illustrate students communicating with respect, integrity, and confidence.”

“Middle school students complete a project in Spanish focusing on a traditional dish from one of 21 Spanish-speaking countries. They identify a unique or emblematic ingredient native to that country. Through exploring its cuisine, meal times, and table manners, students gain insight into the culture, reflect on similarities and differences, and become authentic communicators.”

Resilient Explorers
“In Robotics Club, students learn the value of failure as an opportunity to iterate and improve, navigating challenges and persevering through difficulties while working together as a team.”

“Advisors guide students to reflect on areas for growth by helping them to set and track goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.”

“It's scary to get up in front of people and speak one's mind and voice an opinion. When students enter Drama 6, not all of them are excited about this mandatory class. They wonder, will I be able to memorize a monologue and perform it in front of class? A few of them come to me at the beginning of the year and tell me they have ‘stage fright’ and they aren't sure how to navigate it. They make mistakes, stumble, and recover. For the most nervous of the bunch, when they finish presenting their monologues and they realize that they were successful, their smiles are the biggest and brightest.”