The Family Compass

Conversation guide

Use this guide if you want structure to discuss the different ways everyone answered their worksheet.

The family compass · conversation guide

1 · The goals

Two conversations.

First, the student explains any row they marked the heart of it or not really. What does it mean to them? Why that mark?

Second, review everyone else's answers, and spend the time where one person marked the heart of it and another marked not really or somewhat. If the student is one of them, they make the case first.

Where there's consensus, mark the family's answer on one of the printouts (be fancy and use a different color). Where there isn't, leave it split and give everyone a day or more to think it over.

2 · Where they do their best work

The student goes first again: have them walk through all four rows and say where they landed and why. Where anyone else's mark sits more than one box away, here's the conversation for that row:

Structure or freedom

Disagreeing about structure is often disagreeing about a memory: someone remembers the dropped ball, someone else remembers being micromanaged. Discuss the actual memories, not the abstraction.

Traditional or hands-on

What's a class or project this student loved? Talk about what made it great — was it the teacher at the board, or the thing they built?

Lots of everything or small and known

Ask the student to describe their favorite and least favorite things about middle school. Which of those needed a big school's scale, and which needed a small one's intimacy?

Competition or cooperation

Ask the student when competing has brought out their best, and when it's made them want to quit. Then look for the pattern: do they rise when something's at stake, or when the floor is solid?

Mark consensus in your chosen color; give split rows their day of thinking.

3 · The judging tiers

The student reads their tiers first, top to bottom. Then compare sheets: anything in everyone's top tier goes straight into the family's.

For anything only one person put on top, the person who ranked it says what makes it non-negotiable. Then decide together which kind it is — a dealbreaker you'd walk away from a school over, or a tiebreaker between two schools you already like. Dealbreakers earn the family's top tier; tiebreakers go one down.

4 · The sentences

Read the finished sentences aloud, the student's first, with no responses until all of them have been heard. The family's version can simply combine them — you don't need to decide.

5 · Commit it

Before you all go your separate ways (and your teen goes to their room, door shut, to recover from your lack of chill), get your final answers into the Family Compass tool. Your answers will shape your experience across the site.

sfschoolatlas.com/tools/family-compass