Vision of a Massachusetts Graduate
Massachusetts' Vision of a Massachusetts Graduate is a statewide framework describing six skills and competencies, grouped under three core qualities (Thinkers, Contributors, Leaders), that a high school diploma should prepare students for. Orienteering builds toward all six, starting in elementary school. Teachers can reinforce these areas by encouraging reflection and discussion following the activities. Students who have completed one of the progressions documented in our Lesson Plans section will have demonstrated competency in all six areas.
Thinkers
1. Academically Prepared
A strong foundation across academic disciplines, plus the skills to be a lifelong learner.
Orienteering is applied spatial reasoning and geometry. Students read scale, measure distance, judge direction, and translate a two-dimensional symbol into a real object in the world. Map Discussion introduces this vocabulary explicitly, and every subsequent activity, from Symbol Relay's map symbols to Compass Basics' bearings, builds on it. Because the map and the terrain give immediate, objective feedback, students learn to check their own understanding rather than wait for a teacher to grade them.
2. Critical Problem-Solvers
Examining information to draw connections, question assumptions, infer meaning, and shape solutions.
Students choose their own path between checkpoints from their very first activity, comparing options and weighing tradeoffs long before the skill has a name. The grade 6+ curriculum gives it one explicitly, in the Route Choice lesson. When a checkpoint does not match what a student expected, the curriculum treats that as information, not failure: the student has to re-check their map orientation, re-read the terrain, and revise their plan. Score-O adds a strategic layer, where students decide which checkpoints they have time to reach and choose the order in which they visit them.
Contributors
3. Self-Aware Navigators
Understanding your own strengths and opportunities, and using them to navigate different paths and environments.
Orienteering naturally has built-in variation in challenge so that students choose a difficulty that matches their own ability. Recognizing that you are lost, and knowing what to do about it, is a skill the curriculum teaches deliberately: orient your map, hypothesize where you might be and test it by checking features around you, retrace your steps, make a new plan, and try again. Students leave each activity with direct, personal evidence of what they can and cannot yet do.
We explicitly discuss with students how these navigational skills apply metaphorically to navigating choices in life: recognizing when you are off track, gathering information before deciding what to do next, and being willing to change your plan.
4. Intentional Collaborators
Engaging respectfully and productively with diverse individuals and groups.
Most activities can be done in pairs, which encourages communication and collaboration. Some activities go further and assign two named roles, Navigator and Checker, to create positive interdependence: each partner has a distinct job, and the pair only succeeds if both contribute. Because courses are self-paced, pairs with different skill or fitness levels can work together without either person being held back or left behind. In debriefing at the end of a lesson, students are encouraged to reflect on how they worked together and how they could do that better next time.
Leaders
5. Effective Communicators
Confidently and clearly expressing ideas to diverse audiences, across a variety of mediums.
Vague directions do not work in orienteering. Telling a partner "it's over there" is not as efficient as "past the big tree, between the two benches." Activities that separate who has the information from who has to act on it, like Napkin-O and Word Bank Orienteering, force students to practice precise spatial language until it actually gets someone to the right place. Some lessons include an exercise where a student describes their own location in words while a partner, without looking at the same view, tries to point to that spot on the map: the same skill needed to communicate your location to an emergency responder over the phone.
6. Responsible Decision-Makers
Setting and pursuing personal goals, making sound choices, and demonstrating confidence and competence in shaping your own path.
Boundary Run's central lesson is knowing and respecting the edges of your space, a safety and self-management skill. Score-O asks students to set a goal (how many checkpoints, how much time) and manage it themselves under real time pressure, adjusting the plan as they go. Because checkpoint codes let students verify their own accuracy without an adult standing over them, the curriculum builds the habit of checking your own work and owning the result.