The Compass Field Guide

One school, one orientation, on the hardest days.

$197

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Montessori Makers Toolbox

$197

What’s Inside

49-page working field guide · 20+ fill-in worksheets and team logs · scripts and protocols throughout

The problem

Same child, same beads, two different schools inside one building.

A child dumps the golden beads and walks away grinning. In one classroom, the adult sees provocation and reaches for a consequence. In the classroom next door, the adult sees a signal and starts asking what it means. Without a shared framework, every adult responds from their own inherited defaults, and children learn that safety depends on which adult is standing closest.

The Compass Approach exists so a school responds as one school. It is a shared orientation built from four cardinal points: Notice, Engage, Support, Welcome back. This field guide is the working version: not a philosophy to agree with, but a set of practices, scripts, and team protocols to build, fill in, and use.

What’s Included

What is inside

Six parts, 49 pages, more than twenty fill-in worksheets and team logs. Built to be written in and worn out.

The framework

The four cardinal points, kids-do-well-if-they-can, the brain-body story with a state-reading guide and log, the Montessori grounding, and Observation Week: the five-day antecedent-behavior-context protocol with a full observation log.

The Regulated Adult

Your personal flooding map, the Steady Practice builder (anchor, exhale, steadying phrase), and the five-domain energy audit. The instrument is you.

The Shared Watch protocol

The dignity-preserving adult hand-off for the moment the flooded adult is you: the signal, the hand-off script, the recovery, the debrief, and the team agreement worksheet.

The Support Sequence

Six moves for the hard moment: Steady, Approach, Name, Offer, Hold, Hand Off & Return. With approach geometry, real-choices scripts, and the disciplined wait.

The bias check and the three-harms sort

The checkpoint built into the sequence’s spine, the research behind it, a colleague pattern-review worksheet, and the written sort of which limits are actually limits.

Repair and Return

The five-question repair conversation with plane-of-development adaptations, community repair meetings, partnership calls with families, and the child-study cycle for patterns that persist.

Team practices

Reframe rounds with three months of session logs, and the restoration story template that closes the practitioner arc.

Leading the Compass

For the head of school: de-shaming the Shared Watch, budgeting for regulated adults, the wobble map for reading restoration stories as staff curriculum, and the six-week rollout calendar.

The Compass on one page

A keep-this-page quick reference: the four points, the six moves, the bias check, the three harms, the five repair questions, and the state guide.

Who It’s For

Who it is for

Written for the adults who are in the room when the storm arrives.

Guides and assistants who want a sequence for the hard moment that preserves dignity on both sides
Leadership teams replacing an escalation ladder with a support sequence
Schools that want their peace table doing real work, not decoration
Teams ready to talk about which children get watched most, with a tool instead of an accusation

How schools use it

Start with Part One together as a staff. Then each adult builds their own flooding map and Steady Practice before the team writes its Shared Watch agreement. Run reframe rounds monthly. The guide ends with each practitioner writing one restoration story, rupture to return, and reading it for what it teaches about the school.

A note on evidence, kept honest: the strongest research support for restorative practice is in school climate, relationships, and reduced suspensions. Evidence for direct academic gains is mixed. The guide claims what the record supports and nothing more.