Accessing Reports

After a session ends, your conversations become a listening report. This page walks through what happens once you press "End session", what's actually in the report when it lands, and what to do with it.

After you press "End session"

When you end a session, we take over. Here's what we actually do with the recordings before the report lands in your inbox:

Transcription. We turn each conversation into searchable text.
Translation. If students spoke in another language, we translate it into your school's primary language so they don't have to switch to be heard.
Mandated reporting. If anything urgent comes up — self-harm, abuse, immediate safety concerns — we surface it to your team right away, so you're not waiting on the full report.
Anonymizing. Student names, staff names, and identifying details come out of the transcript before anyone reads it.
Theme analysis. We look for patterns across all the conversations, not just within one group, so you see what's coming up everywhere.
Drafting your report. A Polaris team member writes the report for your district and reads it through before sending.

You'll get an email when it's ready. Most reports take 2 to 3 business days. Larger districts, weekend submissions, or runs across many buildings sometimes take longer; we'll let you know if yours will.

There's a fuller breakdown of the whole pipeline on our features page if you want to see all of it.

What's in the report

Every report is tailored to your district. The questions you asked, the buildings that participated, the themes students raised — all of that shapes what shows up. The sections are consistent across districts, but the content comes entirely from your students.

A typical report has:

Cover-page summary with total conversations, students heard, and the themes surfaced.
Key student voices — short anonymized quotes you can play back as audio.
Theme distribution showing which ideas came up most often.
Per-question deep dive with 3 or 4 themes per question, supporting quotes, and a short writeup.
Recommended changes sorted by effort: quick wins, this semester, next year.
Overall sentiment across the whole session — how positive, neutral, and negative student speech skews.

Every quote is linked back to its real audio clip, so you can hear the student in their own voice rather than reading a transcript.

Sentiment in an empathy interview

Empathy interviews follow a shape. Students start by naming what isn't working. By the end, they're usually describing what they want instead. So a typical conversation skews more negative at the front and more positive at the back.

That's the design, not an accident. The negative half is students telling you which parts of school aren't working. The positive half is them telling you what to do about it. A report needs both, because acting on it needs both.

Closing the loop

The most useful thing you can do with a Polaris report isn't reading it. It's going back to students with what you heard.

The change doesn't have to be big. What students notice is whether anything moves because of what they said. If something does, they'll bring more to the next conversation. If nothing does, that's its own message.

You don't have to act on everything in the report. Pick one or two, do them visibly, and tell students that's what came out of their conversations.

Starting another session

Your Polaris contract includes 4 listening sessions a year. You can start the next one from the Listening Portal whenever you're ready.

Two paths people usually pick:

Same questions, different season. Re-run the same prompts a few months later and compare. Useful when you're tracking how a specific theme is moving over time — climate, belonging, instructional quality.
New questions, fresh ground. Co-create a new set with your team. Useful when something different came up that's worth listening for on its own.

Either way the workflow is the same: co-create the questions, get consent set up, run the session, monitor it, and the report comes back in 2 to 3 business days. By session four, it's worth pausing to look at the arc of the whole year — what shifted, what stuck, where students sound different now.

If you want help picking a path or writing the next set of questions, your Polaris team is happy to talk through it with you.