Data Constellation

A report is a snapshot: one season, one question set, read once. The Data Constellation is the other view — everything students have ever told you, held together as a connected map, with the district's own documents sitting alongside it as context.

The map

Every conversation you record becomes points on a map: the themes students raised, the moments where they raised them, and the threads between conversations that touched the same thing. Instead of reading one report cover to cover, you can start from a theme and follow it — across grade levels, across buildings, across a whole year of sessions.

The point is the connections a report can't show you. A report answers the questions you asked this season. The map shows you where a theme has been building since last fall, which buildings are the outliers, and which student moment is the one everyone should hear.

The context library

Listening data is most useful in context, so the Constellation also holds the other things your district is already working with. When you ask Polaris a question, or when we draft your next listening report, we draw on these documents alongside the student conversations.

Worth adding:

• 1, 5, and 10-year district plans
• Current quantitative data: survey results, attendance, grades
• Feedback forms from individual classes
• Curriculum maps, vision documents, climate plans
• Anything else that relates to what students are talking about in their empathy interviews

Hit + Add files to pull in:

• Files from your computer: .docx, .pdf, .xlsx, plain text.
• Google Drive: a direct connection, so updates to a shared Drive doc flow through without you re-uploading.

Files are searchable and citable. When Polaris draws on a document in a report or a search result, you'll see which file the context came from.

When to add something

Add a document whenever its content might shape how a future report is read. A few examples we've seen:

• A district strategic plan, so themes from student voice can be mapped back to district goals.
• Recent climate-survey numbers, so the qualitative findings sit next to the quantitative ones.
• Class-specific feedback forms, so a report on instructional quality can connect themes to the classes students were referring to.

You don't need a huge library. A handful of well-chosen documents is usually more useful than dozens of loosely related ones.

Together, the two halves are the pitch: your reports stop being "what students said this season" and start being "what students said, over time, in the context of what your district is actually working on."