Empathizing with students: An interview with Jesse Stommel

In which Dan talks with Jesse Stommel of University of Mary Washington in Virginia, and someone who has done a ton of thinking about the intersection of pedagogy, purpose, equity, and life online. They talk about the role of schools during the coronavirus crisis, the ‘pivot’ to online learning, ungrading, and the best line from the greatest Fleetwood Mac cover song. Contact us on Twitter @BigIdeaEd with comments and questions.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Today's episode of What's the Big Idea is brought to you by Kids Screaming in the Background Teachers, are you home now with your own family due to school closures and trying to balance teaching your own classes remotely while helping your own kids continue their education? Well, here's to you teachers, and here's to kids screaming in the background. Now onto the show. So here we are, a few weeks into one of the biggest challenges to face this country, and certainly its educators, in a long, long time. The coronavirus crisis has been compared to 9-11 by some in terms of the jarring national impact, but at least schools stayed open after that dark day. Right now, schools, students, teachers, families, we're all walking through the fog here with closures and impending shelter in place orders. All the more reason to hear from some big thinkers to give us insights and food for thought as we quite literally make this up as we go. Today I call Jesse Stommel on Skype. Jesse is a senior lecturer of digital studies at University of Mary, Washington in Virginia, and someone who's done a ton of thinking about the intersection of pedagogy, purpose, equity, and life online. We talked about the role of schools during this crisis, the quote-unquote pivot to online learning, ungrading, and the best line from the greatest Fleetwood Mac cover song ever recorded. I hope you enjoy. All right, I'm happy to be joined now on the podcast by Jesse Stommel, a senior lecturer of digital studies at University of Mary, Washington. He's also the co-founder of the Digital Pedagogy Lab and the co-author of An Urgency of Teachers, the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Jesse's found on Twitter at Jessicher. Jesse, thanks so much for joining me today.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 2:32

Got a lot I want to get to, including a very cool uh blog post called The Hazel Mixtape. Uh, but we probably should start with the last seven to ten days.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:45

Uh it's getting uh almost cliche to say unprecedented, but um, I think you know, clearly education has not uh has not never experienced anything quite like this in the modern age. What in during the last two plus weeks, what has either surprised you about American education or maybe just been confirmed in your mind about American education?

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Um so I've I've been teaching face-to-face for 20 years, and I've also been teaching online for I think 15 years. And I've taught both face-to-face and online the entire time. And I've I've already always known that people didn't quite understand online learning or how online learning works. And I think that that's been confirmed for me without a doubt in the last um few weeks. Just some of the basic fundamental misunderstandings about how it works and the differences between face-to-face and online learning. And um, I've just been it has confirmed a lot of things that I've known all along in a really visceral way.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

And and what are some of the biggest misconceptions? Because you know, we were just talking before that we started the interview about you know, my school is closed down, you're in a you're in a similar role, and kind of watching people grope through what did what online learning might look like. What are some of the biggest um just misunderstandings that people have about online learning?

SPEAKER_00 4:14

I I think that the biggest misunderstanding is that you I've heard the word pivot, and I don't know if that's a word that you're hearing, uh, even just the idea of hashtag online pivot. The word pivot I have found extraordinarily flawed. Uh, because what it suggests for me is it suggests that face-to-face learning is stuff that you can just neatly pour from the container of a classroom into the container of an online portal. And it just, these are two fundamentally different kinds of places. Uh, so that's one thing, this idea that you can just neatly pivot or transfer or shift learning from one environment to the other. The other piece is that there's something magical or bizarre or wondrous about online learning. All of us are learning online all of the time. Um, at least anyone that's engaged via computers, via social media, via digital technologies. We're used to learning online. So the idea that there would be some special magical unicorn of online learning, I found strange. For example, my institution scheduled two full days to help faculty understand how to move their courses online. So the flaw of moving the course online, but also the flaw that you would need of it takes a lot of time. But the idea that two days of intense preparation would be necessary for this work, I think is an is assuming that online learning is some weird unicorn. For me, it's how do you stay in contact with your students? What tools are you already using to communicate with people online? So email, uh, social media, text message, and you know, things like just calling people on the phone, sending postal mail. So the idea that somehow we would have to completely reinvent how we communicate with each other in order to stay in contact at this moment, I think is bizarre.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Yeah, it the schools around us, we're seeing them actually try to replicate the school day. They want kids to actually go through the school day at home. Um, and and another you you brought up the normal ways that we communicate already with each other. Should teachers be sort of rushing out there to try to learn new technology right now? Because there are so many platforms that now are probably being flooded with interest. And should teachers be trying to take on uh new skill sets?

SPEAKER_00 6:40

So when I'm helping faculty, and I've also done faculty development for many years, when I'm helping faculty think in on a normal day how to start teaching online, I discourage them from experimenting with a lot of new platforms. I say start where you are, start with the tools that you're already using, start with the tools your students are already using. So the idea that people would suddenly start using brand new tools in the next three days is uh I just don't think it's a good way to approach it. Stick with the things you're already using, but the the ways that you're already communicating with with students. I've I've been um remarking online that the idea that somehow everyone would just jump into an LMS or a virtual learning environment, truthfully, the only people I think who should be using those tools are people who are already using them in some ways. Sure, you might use them more in more robust ways for the rest of the term, but I don't think anyone should just be imagining that they can just say, oh, well, the VLE or the learning management system is now just my classroom. I'll just start teaching inside of there. It's sort of, it isn't like walking into a classroom where the desks are in rows or the desks are in circles and you have to decide, oh, wait, how am I going to teach in this room? It's a completely different room with a completely different architecture. You don't even know how to move the chairs around. If you go into a room and all the chairs are in rows and you think, well, I don't teach in rows, you can actually move the chairs. Well, you often can unless they're unless they're bolted to the ground. The thing with moving into an LMS or a virtual learning environment is that not only are all the chairs bolted to the ground, you don't have the tools to unbolt them. And you also don't even know where to start to begin finding those tools.

SPEAKER_02 8:27

Yeah. And and when we picture the architecture of a room with the chairs, often as a teacher, we envision ourselves at the front of that room, leading the learning, doing whatever it is we do in various ways. What's the role of the teacher in the online environment?

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Uh, I think that the role of the teacher is, I mean, the work of teaching is complex and idiosyncratic. So even to imagine that there is one role for teachers, the truth is every teacher teaches differently. And that's one of the complex bits, is that you have to figure out not only how can you be a teacher in an online environment, but also how do the specific idiosyncrasies of your teaching style, how do they fit inside of that environment? How do they translate? I actually think translate is a much better word than pivot or shift because there's actually a fundamental different language that you have to find, a different language that you have to learn in order to speak in those spaces.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

Yeah. And you bring up a great point that teaching is often such a local context and everyone does it in their own way. And schools, every school's different. Uh, schools are used to playing so many different roles in children's lives. Um, in light of being physically separated now from their students, what broadly speaking, what is the role of a school now?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

I'd say and I actually just started to shift my thinking about this in the last couple hours. Because in some ways, I was thinking to myself, well, we want to be able to continue giving students opportunities to learn. We won't necessarily recreate what we were planning to do for the rest of the term. Um, but at the very least, we want to keep creating opportunities for students to learn and opportunities for them to be successful in their learning. So I think that that's still our role. But I was thinking about this and I was thinking perhaps an even bigger role for schools and teachers is to um provide a context for students to work through what's going on in their lives, for them to work through what's going on in this specific moment. So to some degree, I actually wonder if what we ought to do is focus more on students' basic needs. And so by basic needs, I mean I certainly mean do the students have a place to live? Do the students have enough food to eat? I think schools play a role in that. I mean, they've always played a role, even if you think about the school lunch system. So they've always played somewhat of a role in that. Um, but I think we have an even greater role in thinking about students' basic needs. But also when I think about basic needs, I think about their emotional needs as well. Why aren't we in this moment stepping up and being the space where students can process what's going on in their world? Because not much is going on in my world, honestly, aside from just reeling at what's happening. Yes. Business as usual is not considering from a bureaucratic perspective, but it's also just the shape of my day. The shape of my day is nothing but our current moment. And so the idea that we would continue with our content or even continue with the communities as we had built them in the classroom is um it's not only I think impossible, but I think it's a dereliction of our duty. I think that our duty now has to be to create space for students to um reflect on their world.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Yeah, I in planning our own pivot to online learning, um, as I looked at my own curriculum, I I felt that. My curriculum feels so small now compared to the fact that when I stop in at the grocery store, there's literally nothing on the shelves. And the kids were living through the same world and they're at home and cable news is on. And uh how can school leaders sort of drive this? Because teachers might be feeling a little isolated. They might be feeling exactly what you're describing. That yeah, how can I I'm supposed to just keep going on with John Steinbeck's the Pearl while this is all going on in the world? So, how how could how could school leaders sort of uh channel some of that energy that teachers might be feeling?

SPEAKER_00 12:37

Yeah, well, I think really when we think about school leaders, I think in a lot of ways the leadership really trickles down. When we think about school leaders, we have to think about um state leaders and we have to think about our government and the kinds of messages that are being sent to us from very high, which suggest or have mostly suggested up to this point that the world will continue on as it always has. And I think we're only just in the last few days starting to see hear some messaging that is suggesting oh, wait, the world may not continue on as it always has. And so I think school leaders really have to um support and trust their faculty and communicate to them that to give them the space to deal with the current moment. And in some ways, they have to be leading with permission because a lot of us as teachers on the ground, we don't know what we can and can't do. And we need leadership to basically say, we trust you, and we think you'll find the right way through this. And when we all look back on this, none of us will have known exactly what we should have done in the moment, but we all will have had the freedom and flexibility in order to find the right thing to do at that moment. I it's a bit utopian for me to describe it this way because I don't see a lot of school leaders leading from that place.

SPEAKER_02 14:05

Yeah, no, I agree. There's there's the the logistics alone, I think, blocks a lot of creative thinking and a lot of big picture thinking in those ways. Uh, just kind of marrying a couple of thoughts we've touched on here with online learning and just the basic things that schools provide, you know, so often crises reveal um inequality and inequity in the United States. You know, you think we think of something like Hurricane Katrina and what that told us about race and socioeconomics. What have we learned about equity and digital access in the last two to three weeks with regards to schools?

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Oh, I don't, I mean, I don't know that we've learned enough. I think that we are still in the process of learning. Um but when I hear when I hear the continued use of words like continuity or pivot, it does suggest to me that we're not learning quick enough. Because when we think about a word like continuity, you have to ask continuity for who? Um, continuity for the most privileged students. That's who's going to be able to find some sense of continuity. And then it actually makes us wonder wait, what about the thing that we're trying to continue? In many cases, we're realizing that wasn't accessible, accessible to a huge number of our students to begin with. So the idea that we would continue business as usual is both impossible, but it's also making us recognize that wow, business as usual was problematic and flawed to begin with. And a lot of us have our have had already recognized that. I think what this is doing is we're seeing it at scale. We're seeing it at a scale that we have never seen before, at least in my lifetime.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

Yeah, a common um theme on social media right now among educators is will this period of time change education in some way? Will learning or pedagogy be changed uh permanently? Even though we're even though it is the digital, we're trying to hold on to the digital as much as possible as we pivot to online, as you said. But will all this be permanently changed by this period of time, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Um I I have to imagine that it will. Uh I have to imagine that we will learn things from this experience and that we will take those into the into the future, into the future of education. Um, a part of me worries that we might not learn enough. One of the things that I've been starting to talk about and think about is the ways in which so much of what we're doing right now is focused on how do we get through the semester? How do we get through the rest of the academic year? What I'm starting to think more and more about is how do we start having conversations about what happens this summer? How do we have conversations about what's going to happen in the next academic year? I don't think we're going to get back to any semblance of um stability, maybe is the word, any sense of stability by the fall. I think I think that next academic year is going to be fundamentally changed. And what are we doing right now to make decisions about what that educational space is going to look like? What are we doing to reframe and rethink the relationships that teachers have to students, but also the relationship that institutions have to teachers? I think one of the things that we have to recognize is the precarity of the work of teaching. And that's something that mine and Shawn Michael Morris's book is about. The title is An Urgency of Teachers. It's about how necessary and vital teachers, what a vital role they play in our society. And yet I think what we've seen over, I mean, over my lifetime, but definitely over the last 20 years that I've been a teacher, is an increasing precarity of the work of teaching. At the college level, 70% or more of teachers are part-time or contingent. Uh, I think teachers in K through 12 are underpaid across the board, overworked across the board, and also undervalued, and under more than just undervalued, actually, in some cases um scorned by society. Um and I think that we have to find a way to recognize how important teachers are in society as a whole, but especially for dealing with crises like this.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

How did society reach that point, though? Education is an old profession. Um, you know, on some level, you can understand scorn or contempt when it's heaped on a new industry. You think of something like Silicon Valley, which obviously many people embrace the technologies they create, but it's it a lot of people see it as a double-edged sword. How did education get to this point? And I agree with with your with your uh commentary there. How did we get there?

SPEAKER_00 19:00

Um, well, I mean, I think to some degree the profession of teaching, the labor of teaching, has uh it's it the devaluing of that labor has a long history. Uh, it has a long history that is steeped in sexism, for example, that with teaching being considered a woman's profession. And so the devaluing of women, it gets translated to the profession or the labor of teaching. Um, and so I continue to see examples where the work of administration or the work of institutional leadership is masculinized and then the work of teaching is feminized, where the emotional labor that I'm talking about when I'm talking about having students um reflect on their world, where that piece of it is devalued. And it isn't just emotional labor, because I think it's also intellectual labor. We both are working with our students and helping them be critical thinkers of their world, but also helping them process and deal with the complexities of the world that they're in. I would say that it's to sort of get back and answer your question a little bit more directly. I think corporate interest has had a lot to do with it in the last 20 years. The shifting of the work of teaching into for-profit corporate platforms and onto for-profit platforms, partnerships between uh school districts and corporations, a lot of those partnerships being extremely necessary because as the federal government defunds education, education uh institutions have had to partner with for-profit companies. And those for-profit companies, I don't think, have treated that relationship with care, uh, with the care that it needs. So the idea that we would all just move teaching into the virtual learning environment or the LMS terrifies me because it's basically to say, okay, yeah, let's take up shop right in the midst of this, the center of this corporate interest that that doesn't care for education the way that we do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

Yeah, and I had a conversation with a reporter from EdSurge last week, and we were talking about that, how these companies right now stand to uh do very well. And going back to my earlier question, how might education be shifted? Are we in fact going to be thrown more into the arms of these companies that, like you say, really don't particularly care about education so much as embedding their product among a lot of young people and teachers? Um, you talked about reflecting on uh complex uh issues. What are you doing now with your students to help them unpack the situation?

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Um gosh, what am I doing with my students at this moment? I guess I would say that not a lot. And part of the reason it's not a lot is because I'm not ready. My students, in some cases, are not ready. And I so essentially, what am I doing? I'm creating space for the work to happen. And I'm also giving my students. Time to get to a place where they can do the work. I think to imagine that we should all just jump in and do this work as quickly and you know fast as we possibly can isn't to recognize that my students need time to even collect their thoughts. In many cases, they have suddenly left their homes because their homes were on campus and are finding themselves isolated, feeling isolated, or are in some cases finding themselves interacting in other educational environments in their other classes that aren't nearly as humane as the environment that I'm trying to structure for them. So, to some degree, I'm telling my students, take the time you need. This class will be there, the work will be there, we will find ways for you to succeed and come to the work when you're ready to come to the work. And I think that a lot of us need to recognize that that we need to be patient with ourselves and each other.

SPEAKER_02 23:00

Yeah, what what what sort of um reaction are you getting from your students or what kind of communication are you getting as they are adjusting, just like us?

SPEAKER_00 23:09

Yeah, I think my students are relieved. They're relieved to have people and not just me, they're also talking about other teachers who are extending the same sort of both patience and trust and care their way. And they're relieved because there's so much going on in their world and they need the time and space, and they're grateful to get it wherever they possibly can. I also sense among students, and not not my own as much, my own haven't expressed this to me. Um, although I'm not certain that they know they can or they know that it's a safe space for them to do. I'm gonna continue to work with them and let them understand that it is a safe space for this. But a lot of the students that I'm seeing on the internet are also terrified. They're terrified that a rug is gonna get pulled out from under them. They're terrified they won't graduate, they're terrified that they'll lose scholarships, they'll terrified that teachers will mistreat them. And in some cases, teachers or uh institutions are already beginning to mistreat them in in in sometimes direct ways, but sometimes just insidious bureaucratic ways. Systems that aren't looking like they're going to budge for them. And I can tell students, you know, I can say, it doesn't look like those systems are budging right now, but I can reassure you that those systems are going to have to budge. So even if it looks like people are digging their heels in right now, they won't be able to continue digging their heels in. So try not to worry. What they're seeing is they're seeing some instances of institutions digging their heels in, and they're terrified that they won't, that this that the system won't flex the way it needs to. And honestly, I'm terrified too, because there will be cases where the system doesn't flex and where a rug is pulled out from under students.

SPEAKER_02 24:59

What would be an example of um institutional inflexibility that you're thinking of that in particular would uh would mistreat students?

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Well, I'm thinking specifically about something that I have been tweeting about over the last few days, and that's pushing institutions to consider pass-fail options for students, or what I prefer, which is a pass-no-pass option, which means that there is just no possibility for failure this semester. It means that you either pass or nothing at all appears on your transcript. Um and uh finding ways to give students uh at least a respite from the culture of grading and assessment that has taken over in all of education. Seems like even if if this isn't a moment that we rethink all of that, which I hope it is, uh, it could at least be a moment where we give them a respite for this one semester. Uh, and an example at my own institution, my institution announced to students that uh students could take more than one pass fail course this term. Usually, my institution only allows one pass fail course per term. So you can take more than one this term, but then there was a line in the announcement that said, however, you should think about this carefully because pass fail grades will not count towards major requirements or general education requirements. So the idea being that you can take it past fail, but it won't count for anything. And I just thought that is a policy, that is a bureaucratic decision that did not need to be made. And yet it was made in a way that will utterly um that will do harm, that will do harm to students, and especially do harm to students in my class. My class is a senior level um capstone course. So most of my students are graduating seniors, and it will mean that there's no way they can take my course pass fail because they all need it to graduate. Um, and you know, the institution doesn't know or or or necessarily acknowledge or understand what I'm gonna do with my specific set of students. So at the policy level, so we have to change the way we interact with students, but we also have to change the way policies passively and sometimes really actively interact with students.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

Wow, that has to hurt for those seniors. I I've thought a lot about that. If you're in the last year at a particular school, this has got to be a terrible way to end.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Yeah, I was actually writing to my students, and I'll just read you the bit that I wrote to them. I wrote, I just want you to know that I will work out a way for everyone to succeed in this course. My instructions via our online schedule will become more and more flexible to offer you as much space for experimentation and room for error as possible. Just know that I'm here for you, for every one of you, to chat about this class, but also about anything else that's going on. And then this is the part that that really hit me. I recognize that a lot of you are seniors, which means this may be your last semester. It's hard for me to imagine how it feels to suddenly find out that your last in-person undergraduate class has already happened. I was a college senior once myself, and I know that might feel like a loss. I just want to say that I'm thinking of you, that you kick ass for persevering through this, and that you will graduate and go on to amazing things. You will deserve all the emojis. Um, and and the thing is, as I was typing this, my three-year-old daughter, who you may have heard in the background of what we're doing this recording, she looked over at me and she saw my face as I was typing. And she said, three-year-old, lovely, beautiful three-year-old. She looked at her daddy and could see his face and the heartbreak on it. And she said, What happened? And I said, and I just turned to her and I said, Don't worry, it'll be all right, sweetheart. And like she could see how hard that was. And so just small things like that. Like, I mean, the idea that these students will never have their last class.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

Yeah, that that's that that last class you take, last class of high school, last course, last class in at university, it's such a bittersweet moment when you walk out, but you get to have it because you know it's the last one. And that's that's that's tough for those those students.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

Um, yeah, you brought up assessment and uh and grading, and should that even happen now, and a lot of schools are wrestling with that. You recently tweeted that student learning will still happen even if teachers do not witness, evaluate, and record it. Um, it reminds me of something else I saw recently. Someone said that if a student learns in the forest and no teacher is there to assess it, did the learning actually happen?

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:44

Um so we can maybe segue here into your pop, your uh philosophy and policy of ungrading, but in this digital environment, we're moving to what what is the role of assessment now?

SPEAKER_00 29:57

Yeah. Um well, I mean, there's two, there's so many layers to what you just asked. Because there's a layer, there's there's a layer of what do I think about grading? There's the layer of what do I think about grading when classes are online, and then there's the layer of what do I think about grading when classes are suddenly online in the midst of a pandemic. And the good news is that my feeling about all three of them is that I would prefer it not happen. Um, my feeling about all three of them is that great, there's lots of research on grades that show the damage that grades do to in to learning as well as to intrinsic motivation. And um but to me, in this moment, the re the grades also cause an extreme amount of anxiety. And anything that we can do right now to lessen the amount of anxiety that both students and also teachers feel because grading causes anxiety for students, but also causes immense anxiety for teachers. And so I guess what I would say is at this moment, take all of my philosophies and my research on ungrading and push it off to the side and just ask how we can mitigate the anxiety that students and teachers are feeling right now. And grades are a huge source of that anxiety. And so if we can make a change uh for the rest of this term and maybe even for the next academic year that mitigates some of that anxiety, I think we need to.

SPEAKER_02 31:25

Yeah, it's interesting. At the beginning, we were talking about uh equity and and you were um you mentioned that for the most privileged students, the continuity is there. They'll they'll be able to move to online learning and and and and continue on. But then the the flip side of that is that those students are most um they're most available for assessment. Uh and in some schools, I was talking to a teacher in the Seattle area who uh went through a school closure, a you know, sudden school closure. Their district has told them, you know what, there's not gonna be any grades from here on out because we can't, uh we have no way of knowing uh that it's gonna be really done the right way. Um, and you know, and and they're in an unfortunate situation, but I really agreed with that idea that that you know you you do what you can, you support the students as you talked about, but I can't see grading being part of that solution.

unknown 32:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Um and I also think that I I think the degree to which we continue grading, we have to ask ourselves what actually is being graded when we do that. And to me, at this moment, uh, what would be graded if I were giving my students A's, A minus, B pluses, B's, B minuses? And you think about the absurdity of all of those um different uh different levels. And like what's the difference between a B and a B minus? Uh, but what's the difference between a B and a B minus when you're in the midst of a pandemic? When what's when what's being tested and what's being graded is not necessarily students' knowledge of the content or the level of their learning or their effort, but what ends up being graded is their ability to respond in a crisis, their ability to have the tools that they need and the technologies they need, the ability to have the support that they need at home, their own ability to pivot in this moment. And who can pivot? I mean, the people who can pivot are the same people who have quote unquote resilience or quote unquote grit. And the people with resilience and grit are the people who have come from privileged backgrounds, the people who are not learning disabled, the people who are not neurodivergent. I mean, if you even think about something like students who are neurodivergent or students with um diagnosed depression or anxiety, and you think about the amount of the the sort of the increased pressures on the experience of those students, this is not the moment that I want to test their resilience or their grit. This is not the moment where I want to test the resilience or grit of a queer student who was kicked out of the dorms at their college and didn't have a home to go back to because their parents had ostracized them. This is not the moment when I want to be testing that person's resilience and grit.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

Yeah, I I I really appreciate that sentiment because we've got students here, even the students that we see day to day, we see them in person and can talk to them. They're going through so many things that we don't even know about. And now they're going through those things without the social support that they get from school, just being at school. And uh that's uh that's a tough spot to be in. Um, just one last question I want to ask you on ungrading. Just uh I know we could probably talk about that for an hour alone, but just the term ungrading, uh, it it's a very it's it's an active verb. It's not the absence of a grade. If you could just briefly summarize how you approach um allowing your students to demonstrate their their understanding and learning.

SPEAKER_00 35:10

Yeah. Uh so it to me it's an active verb because, in part because the idea that I would just remove grades, I mean, we live, as I mentioned earlier, we live in a system of quantitative metrics and we work within institutions that are interested in ranking students against one another. We we live and work within systems where grades are real and grades exist. So the idea that I would just remove grades from the environment or from the table is folly. Even if I don't put grades on student work, they're still doing the work within a culture of grades and a culture of rampant assessment. So to me, what ungrading is about is getting students to raise their eyebrows at grades, getting us to sort of pull back the curtains of the systems that we teach within and the systems that students learn within, and the systems that we work together within. So to me, the most important piece of ungrading is talking to students really frankly about what grades are, why they exist, how they make meaning, how great how grading and being graded makes us feel. So that to me is the first step is getting is having a critical conversation with students and with our colleagues about what grades are. Um and I think that the next piece is helping students, um, helping students feel like agents within those systems. And so I do a lot of self-evaluation in my in my courses, a lot of metacognition, self-reflection, process letters, writers letters, call them different things depending on the course that I'm teaching. But basically the idea is getting students to um be critical, critical analyzers and critical thinkers of their own work and their own learning. Uh, and I think that that's a crucial skill. It's not about, and to me, it's a crucial, difficult, hard skill to learn how to evaluate your own progress. And it's not something that we're, I mean, people say, well, are your students good at that? And I say, I'm not even always good at that. So, no, they're not necessarily good at it. It's something that it's something that we teach and something that we continue to learn throughout our lives. What did I just do? How did I do it? Why did I do it? How well did I do it? Learning to answer those questions, I think, is a really crucial, a crucial skill.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

And those are all uh aspects that probably translate pretty well into our current environment. Helping students think through things and wrestle with their own strengths and weaknesses and what they're going through. Yeah. Um, I just want to ask you one last question. I really appreciate you joining me today. Um, love to hear your take on what parenthood has taught you about education. Uh, you're you're found online jessestommel.com, and there's a blog post you wrote uh in 2017 called The Hazel Mixtape. Uh, 40 songs uh you put together for your daughter. Uh and uh I I love this list. I'd be curious, two questions. What's your favorite song on this list? And what have you learned about uh teaching and learning since you had your daughter?

SPEAKER_00 38:07

Yeah, I think that uh what I I learn every day from her. I mean, I often have talked about how I learn more from my students than I could possibly teach them. I mean, in any given year, there's what, 50, 75, 100 uh of them, and there's only one of me. And so I have so much more to learn from them than they than they have to learn from from me. And the same is absolutely true tenfold of my daughter. She's teaching me constantly, teaching me every day. The one thing that I that I love about being a parent, especially of a three-year-old, is Hazel is a learning machine. She just like she is constantly doing it, constantly seeking it out. She has such joy, this sort of ecstatic quality when she learns something learns how to do something or when she's trying to figure something out. And it's just absolutely beautiful to watch. And it teaches me things about my own learning and it makes me excited to learn in a way that I had forgotten that I was. And um it it's been it's been fascinating to watch her through this situation because we're, I mean, we do we go on outings, we do activities, but a lot of our days, the last five days, have just been in the house. And I watch how curious she remains about her world. And it's helping me figure out what to do, you know, just paying attention to the small things in my life and the joys that they give me. Um, you can actually, I'm glad that you just started chiming in at this exact moment. Um I'm looking at this list, and there's so many good songs on here. And my husband and I spent a long time picking what songs would go on this list.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

Yeah, I can tell, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

And um, and finding little quotes from them. And so I'm scrolling through. I absolutely love the song Landslide um by Fleetwood Mac, and then the cover by the Dixie Chicks, which is the one that I put on the Hazel mixtape. Yeah, but there's a line in that it's a it's a really sort of it's a it's a rough song, and it's it's such an incredibly written song. But this one line, time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I'm getting older too. And it God, I'm getting chills just reading those lyrics because there's a way in which, like my mortality is something that Hazel has both taught me to like it has both made my mortality hard for me and also something, something marvelous. Um, and our res, and and I guess that song in some ways is about resiliency, but it's a different kind of resiliency than I was talking about earlier. It's about this kind of emotional resiliency that we're like in spite of everything, we do keep on going and that we find new ways to see the, you know, new ways to see the world. Um and I guess I will say, oh gosh, the song Rainbow Connection, Hermit the Frog, What's So Amazing That Keeps Us Stargazing, and what do you think we might see? The sense of wonder at the world that that there is in that song.

SPEAKER_02 41:09

Yeah. Well, I was gonna go with Belinda Carlisle's mad about you, but I can't compete for that kind of commentary, so we'll have to leave it there. Uh Jesse Stommel, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 41:22

Yeah, thank you for having me. It was a great conversation.

SPEAKER_02 41:26

Thanks to Jesse Stommel for taking the time from the craziness that is life right now to have that conversation with me. I really enjoyed it. A couple things that really stood out to me from our talk. Number one, he encourages educators not to try to take on too much new tech right now. Uh the the feeling in schools right now moving to online might be to try to uh learn as many new digital platforms and tools as you can, as quickly as you can. And he has got the great advice to stick with what you know and maybe build on that later. And number two, you can just hear throughout the interview how much care he has for his students and how much empathy he has for them. He puts himself in their place, and that helps them become the best educator he can be. And that's just sound advice for all of us right now. We all have our classes, we all have our own things going on, but ultimately it's about the students, what they're going through, and whenever we can put ourselves in their place, see from their perspective, we'll be doing right by them. Thanks so much for checking out what's a big idea. Today's music, Pierce Murphy, courtesy of the tribe of noise. Check us out next time.

SPEAKER_03 42:52

Hello.