I want Compass to be useful when report cards come around. I also don’t want teachers handing over information about their students to get that help.
There’s a lot of writing involved in explaining learning to families. You need language that’s specific enough to mean something, understandable to someone who doesn’t spend their day reading curriculum documents, and honest about where a student needs support. Doing that repeatedly takes effort, even when you already know what you want to say.
When we built Comment Starters, we had to decide how much of that work Compass could reasonably take on. It already holds a record of what you’ve taught. That’s useful context for drafting language about learning, and it gave us somewhere to begin without asking for student records.
What the teaching record gives us
By reporting time, you’ve already done the planning and teaching. If you’ve been recording that in Compass, the curriculum context is there. You shouldn’t have to assemble it again just to get help with the wording.
Comment Starters draws on that record to suggest learning statements and next steps. You can use your school’s reporting scale and adjust the wording to fit how you write. The product page shows what that looks like in practice.
There’s a limit to what that record can tell us, though. Teaching something doesn’t mean every student understood it, could demonstrate it independently, or needed the same next step.
Compass can’t make those calls from a list of lessons. You make them from the work and learning you’ve seen.
Why we stop at starters
The word “starters” is doing a fairly important job here.
A sentence can sound perfectly reasonable and still be wrong for the student you’re writing about. Even a word like “independently” makes a claim. It needs to be there because you’ve seen the student do something independently, and you have the evidence to support it.
That’s why Compass gives you wording to review and adapt. You decide what fits, what needs changing, and what to leave out. The student’s evidence and the finished personal comment belong in your school’s approved reporting system.
I think there’s plenty of useful work for a tool to do before that point. Getting the curriculum language into a form you can work with is part of the effort. So is having a starting point that relates to the teaching you’ve actually done.
Leaving student information out from the beginning
Simply removing a name from a paragraph doesn’t remove everything it might reveal about a child. Assessment notes, learning needs, and personal circumstances can still be identifying.
We built Compass’s Comment Starters around class-level teaching instead. Student names, marks, work samples, and private assessment notes stay out. If you provide an example of your writing style, a made-up comment can show how you write without sharing a real student’s report.
That leaves you with some work to do, of course. You still have to finish the comment. What I want Compass to reduce is the effort of getting to a draft you can use, so more of your attention can go to whether it accurately describes the student.
If reporting is coming up and you haven’t been tracking in Compass, you can still begin with Catch up on teaching. Comment Starters are part of Compass Plus.
