Professional Development
Facilitated activities that turn a finished report into staff conversation and decisions.
Getting a report is the easy part. The hard part is the meeting where a staff actually reckons with what students said and decides to do something about it. The Impact workspace holds activities built for that meeting.
Professional development is not switched on for every account. It's enabled per organization, so you may not see it even though this page exists. Switch to it with the Impact control in the header — if there's no switcher there, your school is on Listen only. Contact us if you'd like it turned on.
How these work
Every activity is a live room your colleagues join from their own devices, seeded from a report you pick. Every card people draw carries a real student quote out of your own listening data, so the conversation stays anchored to what students said rather than drifting into what adults assume.
- Pick an activity and click Start new room.
- Choose which report seeds the deck.
- Polaris gives you a room code. Read it out; colleagues go to polariseducation.ai/join and enter it.
- Run the activity.
You can have one room open at a time. If you try to start a second, Polaris shows you the one you already have so you can rejoin it or close it first.
You need at least one finished report before any of these will run. There's nothing to deal onto the table until a listening session has been through the pipeline.
The activities
| Activity | Length | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Where Should We Start? | 15-30 min | The group builds action steps out of the report's student voices, drags the quotes backing each idea onto it, then everyone spends a few votes to decide where to begin. Good for opening a meeting or closing a planning block. |
| Sensemaking | 45-90 min | Quote cards are dealt onto a shared table. Play them out, drag them into groupings, stack them, label the groups, and mark up the board with drawing tools until the patterns show. No time limit — pause the board and pick it up in the next meeting. |
| Worldbuilders | 45-90 min | A small group builds one school across fifty years. Each round you draw cards carrying real student quotes, decide as a table what the school should do, and place the card on one of your three shared values. At the end, each person says what their character leaves behind. |
More activities for half-day and full-day sessions are in development. If you're planning an in-service day and want something that runs longer, talk to us — we facilitate these in person too.
Bringing students in
Sensemaking can be hosted by a student rather than a staff member. Grant facilitator access to a student on your roster and they can run a board for their own class.
This is the same idea as student co-analysis: the students who gave you the data are usually better at reading it than the adults are, because they were in the room. Handing them the board rather than the summary is the point.
Past sessions
Finished rooms are kept. Each activity's page lists what your organization has run before, so a Sensemaking board from October is still there when you want to show a board what came out of it.
Paused boards resume from the same list. Pausing releases the room code, so resuming issues a fresh one to share.