Organizing a Listening Session
How to roll out empathy interviews across your organization.
Organizing a listening session
The goal is to hear from as many perspectives as possible, across different backgrounds and groups. The more voices in the data, the more honest the picture. The hard part is the logistics: putting participants into groups, getting them into Polaris, and giving them enough time for a real conversation.
Empathy interview setup
Every empathy interview has three kinds of people in the room:
| Role | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Host | One participant runs the recording from their own device and has extra controls like pausing or skipping a question. If someone in the group has been through host training, they'd typically take this role. Otherwise someone in the group can volunteer to host. |
| Participants | 3 to 6 participants per group is the optimal size: enough voices to surface different perspectives, few enough that everyone gets time to speak. |
| Supporting adult | Present for logistics and to make sure everyone's comfortable, and can monitor the session in Polaris if needed. Not a participant in the conversation unless the session is set up that way. |
Approaches we recommend
Below are four approaches organizations have used. They all work, just with different tradeoffs. Most teams pick one and stick with it, but you can mix and match if your building calls for it.
| Approach | How it works |
|---|---|
| Advisory / Homeroom | Run the conversations in the classroom during the regular advisory or homeroom period. The simplest approach when your schedule already includes one. |
| In-Class | Pick one class that most students take (for example, English 7) and run the listening session during every period of that class throughout the day. A good fit when there's no advisory but the schedule has one universal touchpoint. |
| Scheduled | Modify the schedule for one day so every conversation runs at the same time, typically a 45-minute window organization-wide. A bigger lift up front, but the listening itself runs in parallel and wraps up in a single block. |
| Staggered | Pull students out of regular classes to a dedicated room across multiple days. This is the most complex of the four to pull off, with substitute coverage, hall passes, and makeup work to manage on top of the listening itself. If one of the first three fits, start there. |