Here's how to start a listening session from a teacher account in Polaris. You'll learn to name a session, add participant info questions, use and edit a question template, preview the student view, then host, record, and monitor rooms from both the teacher and student sides.
A listening session is the set of questions students respond to. Create one and it stays open until you close it, so students can record whenever it suits your schedule.
Our templates are built by our team and grounded in published student-voice research. A full conversation usually runs 20-40 minutes, depending on the age group and how many questions you include.
From your dashboard, click Start listening session. Five steps:
Step
What you do
1. Session details
Name the session and add an optional description. The name is what you'll look for later in the Listening Portal, so make it something you'll recognize in six months.
2. Participant info
Optional. Up to three quick multiple-choice questions students answer about themselves before the conversation starts. See below.
3. Questions
Pick a topic and a grade band, or start from scratch. Edit, reorder, and replace anything. A live preview shows each question exactly as students will see it.
4. Review
Polaris reads your question set and flags anything leading, double-barreled, or hard to answer out loud, with a suggested rewrite you can accept or ignore.
5. Confirm
A last look at the whole set, then Create Session. You land on the session's page, ready for students to join.
There's no date to set. A session goes live the moment you create it and stays open until you close it, so students can record across a period, a day, or a week without you scheduling anything.
Step 3 opens with seven topics. Pick one and choose the grade band (3-5, 6-8, or 9-12) — the questions re-pitch for the age group while you watch, so a 4th grader and an 11th grader get the same underlying question in language that fits.
Topic
What you learn
Climate & Culture
Whether the school feels welcoming, fair, and safe day to day.
Belonging & Relationships
Whether students feel known by adults and connected to peers.
Portrait of a Graduate
The skills and habits students think school is (and isn't) building.
Restorative Practices
How fairly conflict and discipline get handled.
Equity & Access
Who gets support and a real voice, and who gets left out.
Learning & Engagement
What helps students learn, and what turns them off.
Wellbeing
How students are managing stress, workload, and support.
The 3-5 sets assume an adult runs the conversation rather than a peer host, since younger students generally need more scaffolding to keep a group conversation going.
Choose Start from scratch instead of a topic and you get a blank set to write yourself. You can also start from a topic and rewrite everything in it — the template is a starting point, not a contract.
A good listening session usually has four to six questions: enough to surface a few different threads, few enough to leave room for follow-ups inside a 20-40 minute conversation.
If you get stuck on wording, Suggest questions drafts a few options based on your session name and description. They're suggestions; edit them.
Most questions are open-ended prompts students talk through. Three other types are available when a plain prompt isn't the right instrument:
Scale (1-5) for a quick temperature check with labels you write for each end. Good as an opener before the conversation goes deep.
Image when you want students reacting to something visual — a photo of a space in the building, two options they're choosing between.
Video for a YouTube clip of 60 seconds or less that you want honest reactions to.
Use these sparingly. The value of an empathy interview is in what students say to each other, and every non-open question is a minute not spent talking.
Step 2 is optional, and worth understanding before you skip it. These are quick multiple-choice questions students answer privately on their own device before the conversation starts — grade level, building, how they'd describe themselves as a student, how long they've been in the district. Up to three per session.
They exist so you can see which parts of your community you actually heard from, and so a report can say "9th graders raised this and seniors didn't" instead of just "students raised this."
Students can skip any of them, or all of them. Answers carry over between sessions, so a student who told you their grade in the fall gets asked to confirm rather than re-enter it.
Deliberately absent: none of the templates ask for race, gender, disability, income, or immigration status. A student's own read on how school is going for them is useful and fair to ask. "What you are" isn't, and your SIS already has it.
Questions you write are saved to your organization, so the next session can reuse them without retyping. Your Organization → Participant Overview shows the answers aggregated across every session.
