Compass Education

Compass Education’s mission is to empower learning communities to educate and act for a sustainable future.

 In alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Compass Education aims to empower one million educators with the Compass Systems Thinking Tools by 2030. We focus on developing teacher capacity for using and teaching systems thinking. We believe that teachers are powerful change agents who can encourage their students to be sustainability advocates and systems thinkers who build a more sustainable world.

We believe that the purpose of education should be to create a more sustainable world. We support inspired teachers, innovative administrators, and educators of all kinds to maximize their ability to impact positive, sustainable change in their students, schools, and teams. We promote transformational learning practices that embrace complexity and encourage action, utilizing systems thinking tools to navigate a path to greater sustainability.

We use a working definition of sustainability grounded in the Sustainability Compass.  Created by Alan AtKisson in 1997 at a meeting of the Balaton Group, this tool reimagines Nobel Laureate Herman Daly’s Triangle.  It utilizes four Compass Points- Nature, Society, Economy, and Wellbeing- to identify systems elements and interconnections. The framework’s inclusion of individual wellness is unique to sustainability conversations but critical to realistic and holistic sustainable outcomes.

We design learning experiences that foster a community of systems thinkers who believe a sustainable world is our opportunity and responsibility.

Gitanjali Paul is the Education Program Manager at Compass Education. In this role, she manages Compass Education’s Education Program to help achieve organizational priorities and goals. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Overseeing learning design & development for educational products & services
• Leading annual evaluation and reporting on the education program
• Managing staff and volunteers running educational workshops & events
• Proposing success metrics and sales targets for educational products & services
• Consulting with partner organizations on educational content and programs
• Supporting grant and fundraising efforts
• Providing input on organizational strategy, goals, and objectives

Our LEAP project team would consist of Gitanjali Paul as the project lead with the support of Compass Education’s Executive Director, Nicole Swedlow. 

As the child of two international educators, Gitanjali Paul grew up knowing she wanted to work in education that would help communities value their unique contexts and experiences as opportunities for learning. She discovered the Compass Tools while working as a high school educator at the International School Manila, Philippines when she took over student workshops coordination for the Global Issues Network Conference in 2012. At this conference, 25 high school students used Compass Education system thinking tools to facilitate 400+ students from around Asia in sustainable action planning. Gitanjali was impressed by how these tools fostered analytical conversations and helped students develop agency and skills to take action in a way she had never witnessed elsewhere.  After completing her Master's degree in 2020 at the University of Massachusetts, she decided to use her considerable skills in curriculum design to support the development of the online delivery of Compass Tools. She is currently the Education Program Manager for Compass Education.  

Nicole Swedlow discovered the Compass Tools just as any other educator might - in a Google search.  She was frustrated that her own kids were not receiving an education that would support them to be engaged, thoughtful citizens and had offered to support their school in introducing service and sustainability on campus.   In an effort to inspire curricular connections to real-world challenges in the community, Nicole introduced the Compass Education systems thinking tools to the educators at the school.   Just two years later the school won the Tie-Association Global Leadership Award for their community outreach and sustainability leadership. This experience inspired Nicole to use her 20 years of non-profit leadership experience to do everything that she can to see that other schools and educators have access to these powerful tools. She became the Executive Director of Compass Education in 2020.

Nicole and Gitanjali are part of Compass Education’s lean Administrative team (of five) and are well-suited to direct and respond to Compass Education’s goals and priorities. Working with academic and research partners to document better evidence of the impact of our work is a key milestone in our current strategic plan, so if selected, Gitanjali and Nicole would prioritize time to participate in the project sprint and enact the outcomes.

Professional learning for educators that empowers them to educate and act as systems change agents for a more sustainable world.

The challenges that we face today as a global community are complex, multifaceted, and systemic. Climate change, polarized politics, growing inequality, pandemic disease, and biodiversity loss will require brave change makers with innovative ideas, cooperative leadership skills, systemic thinking capabilities, and a sustainability mindset. Unfortunately, education is not adapting rapidly enough and educators are not equipped with the tools that they need to empower students to navigate these unprecedented and precipitous times effectively.  

As a result, we are experiencing record levels of educator burnout, disillusionment, student anxiety, and lack of civic engagement caused by:

• Educators' skills deficit to meet their curricular goals AND prepare students for the world they will inherit.  A collective sense of “I’m not sure anything I’m teaching really matters anymore.”
• Students' skills deficit in understanding, adapting, and feeling agency to determine their future.  Students wonder, “How does what I'm learning relate to the real world?” or “What difference can I make?

In the recent UNESCO report by the International Commission on the futures of Education, the portion dedicated to the transformative work of teachers begins with this statement in bold, “In a new social contract for education, teachers must be at the center and their profession revalued and reimagined as a  collaborative endeavor which sparks new knowledge to bring about educational and social transformation(80).

The Tufts University Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) reports that 67.2% of youth discuss political and social issues with their friends and family as a national average, but only 20.6% report doing something positive for their community.CIRCLE research has shown that “communities where young people vote, volunteer, help their neighbors, and belong to groups or associations can be more prosperous and resilient places.”  Multiple research sources demonstrate that educators who are equipped to include conversations about climate and political and social issues in their classrooms will prepare students to act in their communities.

We are at a critical juncture in our history and in the future of education.  We must choose a new path for education that prepares our students to be engaged citizens, inspired to innovate new solutions for a better world.   To accomplish this, we must support and empower educators as systems changemakers and provide them with modern tools for a new generation of thinkers and leaders.

The Compass Tools are systems thinking tools that support educators in bringing complex, real-world topics into their classroom and curriculum, providing easy access points and common language for students and educators to feel empowered to connect classroom learning with present-day challenges and engage them as active contributors to innovative and sustainable outcomes in their communities.  

The Compass Tools are unique as they are NOT another curriculum or data set and require no specific knowledge of climate science. The Compass Tools integrate holistic sustainability education and systems thinking skills into every subject taught in preK-12 school – math, art, languages, science, drama, history, literature, and civics!   The tools support 21st-century learning objectives and fit organically into various curriculum standards, supporting educators to accomplish multiple objectives through single classroom practice. When students use the tools in the classroom, it facilitates communication, deepens current learning, broadens perspectives, develops empathy, and enhances collaboration around topics - making them invaluable for designing meaningful civic engagement projects.

One of the tools, The Sustainability Compass supports holistic understandings of any local or global topic and uses the points of a traditional compass to consider the four foundational elements of a sustainable world (N=Nature, E=Economy, S=Social, W=Wellbeing). The integration of wellbeing in our understanding of sustainability is a significant inclusion that acknowledges individual wellness as an indefatigable partner to accomplishing an equitable and flourishing future.  To illustrate how well the Sustainability Compass supports environmental and social justice conversations while developing important social-emotional skills like empathy and perspective-taking, consider the video linked here that explores how we might explore a seemingly simple but highly complex issue: Why is land important?

Compass Education teaches the Sustainability Compass and a range of other systems thinking tools to educators and education leaders through a series of workshops, courses, and training. We offer both in-person and online professional learning experiences for educators. In addition, we consult with schools, educators, and educational leaders on how to build a shared language and culture of sustainability in their communities.

The Compass Tools, workshops and courses strongly support educators in embracing learning variability. While the tools themselves need to be taught, they are not dependent upon any specific environmental or socio-economic conditions except for a shared language of communication. They also require no particular resources or materials to be applied.  While we provide template resources and instructional packets, they are support resources- optional once educators have the skills and knowledge.

We also know from our work that the systems thinking tools we share are low-floor, high-ceiling tools that educators can use in early years and secondary classrooms. We have evidence through our online database of lesson plans to support this and a global network of educators from all different backgrounds who share stories to reinforce this idea. The tools are not tied to a specific subject or discipline, which supports student-directed learning and differentiation and they can be used differently based on student preferences, skills and personal interests.

We support pK-12 educators across academic disciplines and school leaders. 

Thus far, Compass Education has three main formative research methods through which we evaluate the effectiveness of our solution: individual workshop evaluations, anecdotal feedback, and case study submissions.

 Compass Education consistently evaluates each learning experience to consider how effectively our workshops and courses achieve the desired learning outcomes. We sometimes conduct a pre-workshop survey to assess participants’ pre-existing knowledge of the topics we cover. For online courses, we always have participants fill out a pre-course survey. After every workshop or course, participants are requested to complete an evaluation. These evaluations include information on participants’ perceptions of how well the learning outcomes have been achieved and their qualitative experience. For online courses, the post-course surveys directly revisit the pre-course survey data points. Starting in 2021, we began ensuring that the forms for each type of learning experience remained the same throughout the year so that the information could be collated at the end of each year to reflect on the overall effectiveness of each workshop or course.

Our team has great confidence in the effectiveness of our approach and solution due to the anecdotal evidence we have collected from participants over the years. Participants are invited to submit a written or video testimonial at the end of each workshop or course, and we keep track of these testimonials. Recently, we have collected some video testimonials from educators who have worked with us over several years to talk about the impact of being involved with Compass Education on their professional growth and trajectory.

Lastly, we collect case studies of how educators apply their learning from our workshops and courses through our “Certification Review” process.  When an educator completes a workshop or course, to receive a formal certification, they must submit a lesson plan or action plan to demonstrate the application of their learning. These typically include a summary of the project, a reflection on its implementation, and their judgment of how Compass systems thinking tools impacted learning. We have this process for our Level 1 course offerings (several equivalent intro level courses) and Level 2 offerings (two equivalent courses). Until 2020, these submissions were reviewed by whichever member of our Global Facilitator Network ran the training for the participant submitting. In 2021 we instated a ‘Certification Reviewer’ to identify one person at a time as someone trained to provide feedback and certify people in a consistent manner.  Many of our certification submissions are publicly available on our website in our free lesson idea database. Out of the thousands of educators who have been through our training, hundreds have successfully completed the certification process.

The evaluations we regularly conduct for our workshops and courses have reflected that participants primarily enjoy and learn in our educational programs. We can see clear indications that educators who go through our online courses, in which we have them take pre-and post-assessments, experience higher confidence in utilizing systems thinking tools after completing their learning with us. We can also see that participants are able to identify ways that systems thinking tools can be used in their own contexts to support student learning. 

Our anecdotal evidence, such as the video testimonials we have collected from long-time team members who have learned with us over the past decade, indicate that participation in our  Global Facilitator Network have supported them to grow in terms of their confidence, skill, and their overall educational leadership for sustainability.  We also see that many people who have completed both levels of our course offerings have moved into positions heavily focused on sustainability, such as school Service-Learning Coordinators or Sustainability Coordinators.

Our certification submissions reflect that teachers can utilize systems thinking tools across various disciplines in grades PK-12 to integrate sustainability into their curriculum. This reinforces that the tools are not tied to any specific subject or age range and also affirms the broad applicability of the tools in support of learning variability and shifting classroom requirements.  One of the most exciting results of our research is the educator resonance with the applicability of systems thinking for sustainability across the globe and in contexts of formal and non-formal learning.

We know that our work has had an impact. Past participants in our workshops and courses have told us that their learning and involvement with us has helped them to design impactful learning and integrate sustainability into their teaching.  They also share that their greater awareness of systems conditions has been critical to supporting them to move into educational leadership positions.  We are aware of stories across the world where students are actively using the Compass Education systems thinking tools to explore issues in their communities and become civically engaged. We hear all of this, but our organizational structures are not set up to effectively capture and document the effectiveness of our work so that we can communicate it to others.

Compass Education is ready to develop and implement a better plan to measure our work's effectiveness. From its creation in 2010 until 2020, Compass Education was a volunteer-run organization supported by the time and energy of classroom teachers who wanted to contribute through developing educational programming to spread systems thinking for sustainability. Though we registered as a U.S. nonprofit in 2015 and benefited from the guidance and leadership of experienced sustainability professionals during this time, it was in 2020 that we hired a new Executive Director and instituted part-time staff positions to be able to refine and formalize processes in order to be more effective in achieving our organizational goals.

Since 2020, we have established many systems to lay a foundation for growth. We have adopted project management software to document and improve workflows, clarified role descriptions to ensure critical responsibilities are covered, improved our internal communication structures to improve documentation, and more. In our Education Program, we have refined and increased the vertical alignment of our programming to develop clear learning pathways and a focus on our desired learning outcomes. The outputs and desired outcomes from participation in the LEAP program would enhance our readiness to measure the effectiveness of our programming as we step into our growth potential.

In 2020, for her Master’s Capstone Project, the Project Lead for this proposal ran a series of online training with our Compass Education Global Facilitator Network members on monitoring and evaluation practices that could help measure the program's effectiveness. However, the volunteer nature of the members in that group, their limited time to devote to project development, and their preoccupation with the global pandemic meant that many of these ideas were never implemented. Since 2020, the Administrative team has worked to build more monitoring and evaluation; however, this could be significantly improved by working with the LEAP project fellows through a structured, time-contained project. 

Compass Education has worked hard to position ourselves to scale this important work, but we must develop our capacity to document our impact in a structured way. The LEAP project support would allow us to approach measuring our effectiveness using research-based evidence of the critical impact of the systems thinking and sustainability tools that we teach and share with educators. 

1. To what extent do educators feel confident integrating systems thinking and sustainability into their work before and after participating in Compass Education’s programming?
2. How does integrating Compass systems thinking tools into the curriculum impact the development of students' 21st-century learning skills?
3. In what ways and to what extent do participants of Compass education programs go on to utilize the Compass tools with students to engage in community civic engagement projects?

Our team is open to a wide range of recommendations, guidance, and strategies from the fellows. Below is a list of potential outputs we would desire from participating in this project. We would not expect all of these outputs; rather, we would be most interested in these outputs.

1.  Specific recommendations for updating our workshop and course evaluation procedures to better monitor and evaluate our education program’s effectiveness.
2. Specific recommendations of metrics that we can report on quarterly or annually to communicate the effectiveness of our education program to our stakeholders, community, and potential funders.
3. Guidance on the best types of qualitative data collection methods that we can utilize to capture the unique experiences of our education program participants that align with modern, equitable best practices in nonprofit data collection.
4. A summary of the existing research on the impact of systems thinking tools on teaching and learning with recommendations for the questions or research we might conduct at Compass Education to replicate research in our own context to demonstrate effectiveness, project outcomes, and long-term impacts.
5. A list of strategies used by similar organizations, global education nonprofits with a lean administrative structure, to document and measure impact worldwide on student learning.
6. Strategies for conducting an impact survey in the year 2024 to help us better document and report on the effectiveness of our education program.

Our team plans to utilize this LEAP Project's outputs to update our organization's monitoring and evaluation systems, especially in our education program, as soon as possible. Since the team lead is the Education Program Manager who oversees the program, she will be able to take steps to implement recommendations immediately. The other project member is the Executive Director, who would be able to ensure that any project outputs align with overall organizational priorities and other ongoing projects.  

Ideally, we would like to implement these outputs in 2024 and begin the new year with a plan to improve how we measure our program effectiveness. However, we are happy to be part of either wave of this project, which means we could begin implementation in late 2024 into 2025.

 Our Administrative team will synthesize this project's recommendations to create a timeline and plan for implementing the recommendations. Our Administrative team comprises the Executive Director (project member), Education Program Manager (project lead), Operations Director, Media and Communications Coordinator, and Social Media Specialist. Thus, the team will be well-equipped to create a feasible timeline that aligns with other programs and initiatives.

We will also share the experience and results of this project within our Global Facilitator Network of 38 educator practitioners. This would provide a chance for feedback and buy-in to any changes that may impact their work. This is an essential step, as many of our facilitators designed the workshops, training, and courses that we run today. Their insights and input would be invaluable and allow us to build buy-in from the individuals who may be part of gathering information that is essential to measure the effectiveness of our work. This would also allow us to upskill any interested facilitators in this arena, which aligns with our organizational goals to foster a culture of organizational learning at Compass Education.  

An additional step we would explore is how we can leverage our experience in this project and the project outcomes to update our marketing and messaging to highlight the effectiveness of our work. This would surely include blogs and social media posts about our involvement in the project, which we could publish during or after our participation, depending on the guidance from the LEAP project. We would create a visual or video report at the end of our LEAP project involvement to share with our stakeholders through a blog or social media video. We could invite the fellows to write or share their experiences working with us if interested.

As a result of participating in the LEAP project sprint, we envision several short-term and long-term outcomes.

Short-term outcomes

1. Increased administrative staff capacity in monitoring and evaluating our education program to measure program effectiveness.
2. Staff prepared to implement updated monitoring and evaluation strategies in our team that measure our Education Program's effectiveness.
3. Language, information, and resources that we can share with our Global Facilitator Network to help them reflect on the effectiveness of their work in their own regions and other programming capacities, such as community building.
4. Improved reporting metrics to demonstrate our education program effectiveness to potential funders, stakeholders, etc., that we can report on in 2024-2025.

Long-Term outcomes:

1. Deepen the culture of reflection and organizational learning in Compass Education
2. Increased organizational capacity to measure and communicate the effectiveness of our work.
3. Improved reach into our target audience, especially educators and education leaders in public and state-funded schools.
4. Increased grant funding to fund curriculum development, translations of materials and courses into other languages, and to fund continued research.
5. Demonstrated methods of ESD to report and share at regional and global conferences.
6. Enhance Compass Education’s recognition as an organization doing impactful work in the field of education for sustainable development.