The thinking behind it
Most of us begin teaching without ever really examining the values underneath our choices. They come from our own schooling, our training, the places we have worked and the people who shaped us. They drive what we aim for in the classroom and how we teach, usually without us noticing. The Compass exists to make them visible.
The Compass grew out of a long tradition of values reflection in education, in particular Mike Bottery's five codes of education (1990, updated in 2019 with an ecological code). Bottery's exercise asks you to weigh five whole philosophies of education against each other. The Compass extends that thinking in two ways. It breaks the philosophies into nine specific tensions, because most educators do not sit inside one camp but somewhere between several. And it asks about each tension twice.
Every tension is a pair of positions that are both genuinely held by thoughtful educators. Nothing here is a trick and no answer scores points. You meet each tension in two forms. First as a belief question, about what you hold to be true about education. Then as practice questions, about what you would actually do in a concrete situation. The distance between the two is often the most useful thing the Compass shows you. Researchers call these espoused theory and theory in use (Argyris and Schön), the values we claim and the values our actions reveal.
A gap between them is not a failing. It can mean a belief still being built into practice, circumstances that make the belief hard to act on, or a deliberate adaptation to the place you teach. Only you can say which, and that is why the Compass asks you rather than telling you.
At the end you divide ten points between five purposes of education. Sliders let you lean both ways at once; scarce points do not. The difference between what you rate highly and what you protect first is itself worth sitting with.
The Compass is not a diagnostic and not a personality test. It will not sort you into a type, and it does not believe there is a right place to stand. It is also not neutral. The tensions were drawn mainly from Anglo-American and European philosophy of education, and educators from other traditions might draw different axes altogether. Treat it as one mirror, shaped by a particular tradition, not the mirror.
If you agree on the opening screen, your responses are recorded anonymously. The record holds your slider positions, your warm-up choices, the reasons you pick for any gaps, your ten-point allocation and the moment you reach your results, each stamped with a random session code and the time. Optional written notes are stored after being automatically stripped of email addresses and phone numbers, so please write them without naming people or schools.
Nothing that identifies you is kept. No name, no email, no IP address, no location and no account. The fonts and code load from this site itself, with no analytics scripts and no trackers. Like any website, the hosting service handles your connection to deliver the page, but none of that enters the research data, which sits in a secure database hosted in London.
The purpose is twofold. First, to improve the Compass itself. Second, to build an anonymous picture of how educators hold and enact their values, which may be analysed and published in aggregate as research. No individual response will ever be published.
Taking part is voluntary and the tool works exactly the same if you decline. One honest limitation of anonymity is that we cannot find your response afterwards, so it cannot be withdrawn once submitted.