Data Workshop (Optional)
A facilitated session where students make sense of their own data and prepare to present it back to staff, boards, and policymakers.
Optional: Data workshop
A Data Workshop is when students themselves work with the report and the underlying conversations, make sense of what's there, and then prepare a presentation for the adults who need to hear it. The Polaris report is one read. A workshop is the students' read — translated into something they can deliver to staff, the school board, a community meeting, or a policy audience.
This is independent of the Polaris report. Some districts use a workshop to ground a staff PD day in student voice. Some use it to brief the school board. Some put students in front of a policy or legislative audience. The throughline is that students are the ones presenting what their voice means, in their own words, with the report and the audio as evidence.
Free resources
The Polaris Education library at pd.humanrestorationproject.org includes a set of workshop resources for any team to use and adapt:
- Facilitation guides for walking a student group through the report, surfacing what they want to amplify, and shaping a presentation around it.
- Sharing tools that let districts pull quotes and excerpts from interviews with PII redacted, so students have safe material to read, discuss, and quote in their own slides.
- Templates for the kinds of presentations students typically need: a 10-minute PD opener for educators, a 5-minute school board update, a longer policy-audience version with research linked in.
- Prompts for the conversation between student presenters and the adults they're presenting to — so the room doesn't end at "thanks for sharing".
Pull what works and fold it into student leadership programs, capstone projects, or PD planning your district already runs.
Want our team to lead the workshop?
If you'd rather not run the workshop yourself, the Polaris Education team can lead it for you — on-site or over video. We bring the same resources linked above, plus our facilitators in the room (or on the call) to help students shape a presentation that genuinely lands with the audience they're presenting to.
This is a paid add-on. The upside is that your staff aren't also designing a presentation training as a side project alongside the rollout. Our team handles the facilitation, which keeps students focused on their voice and your staff focused on supporting them.
If that sounds useful, reach out and we'll scope it to your timeline and budget.