Data Workshop

Data workshop

A Data Workshop gives the students who took part a chance to work with the report and the underlying conversations, interpret the findings, and prepare a presentation for their community: colleagues, a leadership team, a school board, or a policy audience.

It runs separately from the Polaris report. Some districts use a workshop to ground a staff PD day in student voice, some to brief the school board, and some to put students in front of a legislative audience. In every case, students present what they said 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".

These also fit into student leadership programs, capstone projects, or PD planning your district already runs.

Want our team to lead the workshop?

The Polaris Education team can lead the workshop for you, on-site or over video. We use the same resources linked above and coach students through drafting, rehearsing, and tightening a presentation for their specific audience.

This is a paid add-on, and it saves your staff from building a presentation workshop from scratch. Tell us who the students will be presenting to and when, and we'll put together a plan.