Stop Drowning in Data: Why Uncertainty Makes Us Better Educators

In this S5E9 Schoolutions Teaching Strategies conversation, join me with Angela Stockman to move beyond feeling overwhelmed with data, thanks to Angela's practical teaching tips that foster student-centered learning. Learn how to refine your classroom practices and assessment strategies for better outcomes. This video provides actionable insights for teachers by improving data analysis to inform teaching strategies.

If you've ever felt like you're drowning in data but starving for actual insights about student engagement and classroom behavior, this conversation with Angela will transform your approach to teaching.

💡 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:
✓ Why documentation sustains your energy instead of draining it
✓ How to use tools like Otter.ai and Unruler for easy documentation
✓ The difference between compliance paperwork and pedagogical documentation
✓ How to get "under the hood" of quantitative data with student perspectives
✓ Why saying "I don't know" increases your credibility as an educator
✓ How to pick one focal point and document for a full year
✓ Ways documentation improves instructional strategies and student success

Episode Mentions:
💫The Writing Teacher's Guide to Pedagogical Documentation
💫Carla Rinaldi
💫Bill Cope
💫Mary Kalantzis 
💫Nell Duke
💫Kelly Cartwright
💫John Hattie

CHAPTERS
0:00 - Introduction: Drowning in Data, Starving for Insights 
1:00 - Meet Angela Stockman: 20+ Years of Documentation Research 
2:00 - Welcome & Episode Overview 
3:00 - Research Foundations: Carla Rinaldi & Reggio Emilia 
5:00 - Why Documentation Matters Now More Than Ever 
6:00 - Understanding Learning from Students' Perspectives 
8:00 - Documentation as Sustaining Energy (Not Draining It) 
9:00 - Compliance vs. Pedagogical Documentation 
10:00 - Being a Teacher by Learning, Not Just Doing 
11:00 - Too Much Data, Not Enough Savvy 
12:00 - Getting Under the Hood of Quantitative Data 
14:00 - Making Documentation a Routine, Not a Burden 
16:00 - Practical Tools: Otter.ai & Speech-to-Text 
18:00 - Creating a Documentation System That Works 
20:00 - Sharing Documentation with Students & Families
23:00 - Documentation as a Love Language 
25:00 - The Power of "I Don't Know" in Teaching 
28:00 - Credibility Through Curiosity, Not Certainty 
30:00 - When Students Teach Us More Than We Teach Them 
32:00 - Messy Implementation & the Beginner's Mind 
33:00 - Avoiding "Lift and Drop" Best Practices 
34:00 - Lightning Round: Best Documentation Tools 
35:00 - Biggest Mistakes in Documentation 
36:00 - Advice: Pick ONE Focal Point for the Year 
37:00 - Connect with Angela Stockman 
38:00 - Final Thoughts & Call to Action 
39:00 - Outro & Next Steps

📧 schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com
🎵Benjamin Wahl

When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

Olivia: [00:00:00] If you've ever felt like you're drowning in data, but starving for actual insights about your students' learning, today's conversation is going to be a game changer for you. I am talking with Angela Stockman. She's worked with over 100 school districts, and she's been studying pedagogical documentation for over two decades.

Here's what blew me away. Angela taught five sections of the same eighth grade class every single day, so she knows exactly what it's like when teaching feels more like performing than learning. But here's the thing that might surprise you. Documentation isn't about those compliance checklists or proving what happened in your classroom.

Angela's going to show us how picking just one focal point for an entire year. Yes, the whole year can transform you from an exhausted teacher just trying to get through the day into an energized [00:01:00] learner who's genuinely curious about why things work or don't work in your specific content. And my favorite insight, Angela says, you don't need to be certain about everything to be credible. In fact, saying, I don't know, and studying alongside your students is where the magic really happens. So if you're ready to discover how documentation can actually prevent burnout instead of causing it, let's dive in together.

This is Schoolutions Teaching Strategies, the podcast that extends education beyond the classroom. A show that isn't just theory, but practical try-it-tomorrow approaches for educators and caregivers to ensure every student finds their spark and receives the support they need to thrive. 

I am Olivia Wahl, and I am so happy to welcome Angela [00:02:00] Stockman to the podcast today. Let me tell you a little bit about Angela. Angela Stockman is an author, a former public school educator, and a current adjunct instructor in the Department of Education at Daemen University in Buffalo, New York. She makes it her mission to help teachers and administrators solve high stakes literacy problems. Documentation is usually the most rewarding aspect of that work. And Angela, that is exactly why I reached out to you. I have been following you for years. This is a moment in time for me. I will never forget. Um, I still saved a piece you wrote about formative assessment from many moons ago. 

Angela: Oh, God. It's probably something I just took off of my website when I redid it.

Olivia: But it's so good. So I have these little nuggets that I read and I've printed, and the paper edges are all curled up. But you [00:03:00] have been doing this work for a long time and you have so much brilliance to share. So we're gonna be talking about making documentation a routine today, and um, I like to start every episode with having guests share a nugget of research or a researcher that really impacts the work they do. So will you start us off with that? 

Angela: We lost Carla Rinaldi this year. Um, Carla was the president of Reggio Children, um, and the researcher whose work around documentation I valued so much. I've made several study tours to Reggio Emilia, Italy. Thanks to my friend, um, Lenore Laca, and she's from Scarsdale. Carla does beautiful work around documentation and it's her own, from her own classroom and she shares her brilliance with others. It was through her, um, that I became familiar with Carla's work and was able to visit. And so that's a researcher that I point to a lot. It's [00:04:00] hard though to settle on just one. Um, I'm also very much a student of everything that Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis share. These are researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana, whose focus is largely on multiliteracies for me. They do a lot of work in the field, but that's, that's the, the place that I spend a lot of time with, um, around their particular work. And then, um, Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright's research I keep up with.

And so much of what BIPOC scholars have to share around the liberatory nature of literacy, it's sort of a convergence of those different fields of thought and corners of the world that I'm constantly sitting in the middle of and negotiating. So, yeah. 

Olivia: Well, I appreciate all of those people and the contributions they make to our work, we stand on the shoulders of, um, their practice and their writing and [00:05:00] something that you have really been focused on and helped me ground my stance in when it comes to documentation is that idea of shifting from the burdensome mindset or the have-to mindset to more the idea of creating a routine for ourselves. Because documentation is critical to our professional growth. So I, I would love for you to just start off, can you speak to that more? Why is documentation so important? 

Angela: That answer has changed for me over the last 20 years. Um, and I would say that all of the answers that I could offer there are relevant, but there's one that I think is especially important right now. Um, as someone who is new to the work. It blew my doors off when I began documenting what I was trying to do in the classroom and inviting students to do it at the same time. [00:06:00] Um, sometimes we were noticing and interpreting things the same way, and sometimes our perspectives were very, very different.

And always, it helped me sort of resolve that tension between the shiny best practice that I have drank every bit of Kool-Aid around and how it flops into my setting in a very messy and less than perfect way. Documentation really helped me understand better why things worked and why they didn't, but most importantly it helped me understand those things from learners' perspectives. Then it kind of pushed that, started pushing all of this tension around how do I gain some diverse perspectives here because this is a very narrow environment that I'm kind of doing this action research sort of thing in. And so documentation gave me the ability to sort of [00:07:00] share what I was noticing and doing with people. Well, outside of my, you know, physical on the ground community. Um, these were the days where, you know, I could go on Twitter and share something that I was noticing or doing or really struggling with. And many people with diverse perspectives would chime in and push my thinking.

Documentation is still all of those things. It's also become something that helps us get under the hood of quantitative data really well, to understand why students might be performing the way that they are from their perspective. But the unintended gift of documentation for me, and it's taken me a couple of decades to really realize this, and it's why I wrote, um, my last book, is it's sustaining. It sustains my energy for this work. It keeps me curious. I remember [00:08:00] when I was in the classroom, I taught five sections of the same eighth grade class a day, and I didn't have a good toolkit for how to maybe liven that up a little bit and make it more engaging for all of us, including me um, no matter what context I find myself in, because I document my learning it's fascinating every day. Um, but most of the time it's also very humbling and I always still feel very much like a, like a beginner, I'm like a learner. 

Olivia: I also, that makes me wonder, it makes me think of a couple of different things because I think when people hear the word documentation, it sometimes can make people say, Ugh, that's compliance or paperwork filling in where your stance and your most recent book is really about the idea of pedagogical documentation, and I would love for you, like, how do [00:09:00] you envision that differently than the concept of compliance or paperwork filling in.

Angela: So often I will not mention documentation as, uh, an approach. I won't invite it through email. Or even through, um, telephone conversations with administrators or teachers, because I worry that the first thing they think of is a checklist or a spreadsheet where they have to prove that something did or didn't happen. And certainly that is a form of documentation. Um, but the documentation that I'm talking about is more about presence.

It's more about curiosity, it's more about, you know, when I just listened to that awesome interview that you have with John Hattie, and I loved the way that his, I believe his wife described getting nosy. It's about [00:10:00] being nosy and not necessarily. It's not about checking it off, getting it done, proving something did or didn't happen. It's about studying it. It's about investigating and not having the burden of just being a teacher doing, but it's about becoming a teacher by learning. Um, and that's really rewarding and exciting stuff. It changes our relationships with our students. It, it changed my relationship with myself too, I think.

Olivia: So I, I, I do wanna circle back to how it changed the, the, your relationship with yourself. And I also want to pause because you just mentioned the interview with John Hattie, and I know John Hattie also endorsed your book, The Writing Teacher's Guide to Pedagogical Documentation, and in that book he specifically said that we go down way too many rabbit holes in his endorsement, “We go down way too many rabbit [00:11:00] holes when it comes to data.”

So how does your approach really stray away from that rabbit hole and help us ground ourselves? 

Angela: You know, I think it's wonderful that we have access to so much data, and I define as a, a data-informed, um, educator for sure data matters, but I think we have way too much data and not enough savvy. I still have lots of friends and colleagues in the field who scoff and are real bitter about data all the time because they define it as numbers and they'll say things like. I don't use data, I rely on what I'm learning from my students and their behaviors. That's data. Um, what's really sad is how it's come to be defined in the field.

So data are information and when we can get savvy about what data are actually worth studying. [00:12:00] I, I think that's what can be so powerful. Oftentimes when I work in schools, we take a, a deductive approach and I ask lots of questions around, how did you decide what was important here? Or how do you know what the problem is or what the potential solution might be? What evidence do we have of that? And oftentimes just asking those questions it illuminates really great entry points for getting savvier. What data or information are missing? Who's most affected by what we're about to do here and what do we know about them? How can we begin to kind of push our thinking there?

So when John refers to rabbit holes, how I kind of think of that and his interpretation might be different. I don't, certainly don't wanna speak for John Hattie. Um for me, it comes down to we chase every single opportunity to gather data and react to data, [00:13:00] and it's almost as if we are constantly virtue signaling around all of the data that we have access to, when really it becomes about what's most important to pay attention to and how can we go deep there? How can we make a deep and sustained study of that in many different contexts and include many different voices, especially the voices of the people who are most affected by it, right? By the decisions that we make. 

Olivia: Yeah, and and I'm now thinking too, if I am someone listening to this conversation, it sounds good. Like I, I'm, I'm following along and then I'm thinking, ugh but that routine, like what does it look, what does it feel like daily? What does it feel like weekly? You mentioned you had five preps as a middle school teacher, so how do you juggle the management of the goodness of collecting [00:14:00] data and documenta documentation?

Angela: So if I were still in that situation and the work that I facilitate in schools has me in, you know, constantly partnering with teachers and administrators who are, have similar demands, right? You're not gonna document every single thing that you do every single day in those contexts. As I said before, the approach is usually a bit more deductive. So we'll begin by really asking ourselves, looking at tasks that might include standardized assessment data, but like 10 years of standardized assessment data and what trends keep coming up over and over and over again. When I did this recently in a school that I support where teachers are, are feeling that that overwhelmed, just like you described, it really seemed from the state assessment data that learners were struggling to both identify and compose a main idea.

But then I asked, you know, what other tasks could we look [00:15:00] at? Student work samples from both summative and formative sorts of assessments. And then I asked, what about their tendencies? Do we have any real solid data around their behaviors, beyond our opinions and our reactions and, and all of that you know, we come into a a room and when I ask. Let's talk about someone's behavior. The first thing that sort of jumps out is that one kid who does that one thing that is like derailing your entire life. And, and that's an important data point, but not necessarily robust, right? So we want task data, we want tendency data. And then, um, we also want talk. Have you audio recorded anything?

Do you confer with writers? Do you listen over shoulders? Usually there are some pieces missing. That doesn't mean we can't get started, so if we suspect that students are struggling to identify and compose main idea, we might take it in [00:16:00] 6 or 10 week cycles, and I'll invite teachers to go into their classrooms and we'll reach agreements around what's manageable when I come back in six to 10 weeks can you bring artifacts of learning, photographs, video, audio, and we'll spend some time kind of journey mapping that next six to 10 weeks and identifying exactly where the potential for documentation exists when they come back to the table. We are using that evidence to develop a more refined understanding of the problem and potential solutions. That main idea, focal point is a K-12 focal point…

Olivia: Sure is… 

Angela: …that we have studied in one school district for the last three years and we've seen some good improvement, not only on standardized assessments and local assessments, but what we're seeing is that when we're responsive we're getting it right far more often, and we know that because not only is performance [00:17:00] improving, but behaviors are improving and engagement is improving, and where it's not, we're really realizing that the root cause of that main idea problem might be something that doesn't seem like it has anything to do with main idea, but it does. For instance, it might be a phonics issue. We might. Right. And it's really fascinating how once we've empowered students around that, behaviors begin to diminish. 

Olivia: They sure do. 

Angela: So I think a focal point that is data informed, you're not totally certain necessarily. And even as you're documenting, you're gathering new data and better data and you're kind of, uh, enriching. Right. Um, that process, but the whole notion of document, every single thing you do every single day, um, that's a very inductive approach. I take that approach professionally and personally for [00:18:00] myself. I've also been doing this a very long time, and I'm not in school all day from seven in the morning till 3:00 PM It's just…

Olivia: So I, I wanna process what I hear you saying for listeners and for myself. I hear you saying that it will help district-wide to build a culture of learning, really taking that bigger picture, umbrella point, focal point that we can all center and calibrate around and by the example you give is around main idea and it's looking at that bigger picture data, state data, but then it also then can help us, because a question I had in my mind for you was, what obstacles do people face? It can be obstacles that come around, behavior issues, all of these other layers that prevent the learning from happening. So if we can really pinpoint the obstacles to learning, then it [00:19:00] helps us establish healthy patterns and to study data to document the learning that's happening. That's 

Angela: That’s data too, when the behaviors are getting in, in the way of our ability to study something that's more maybe academic or content or skills or concept-based. Um, that behavior is the data. Um, and it begins to, and it was fascinating in the school that I'm referencing, um, because the behavioral issues were occurring down in kindergarten. And oftentimes there's a perspective, right, that we're not gonna do anything academic in pre-K or kindergarten. We need to protect time for them, you know, to just be kids, to be creative, and to play all day. 

And what was really fascinating was how proud students were and how purposeful they became once they did have the opportunity to begin. Um. Working more with their phonemic [00:20:00] awareness and with phonics and learning some academic skills and content. It's almost as if they're showing up to school ready to do their job and they are excited and proud. Um, and then we started seeing movement around that, that academic skill that we were studying, which was main idea. 

Olivia: So when it comes to documentation, what have you seen pattern wise? Work very well. For the school districts that you've worked with, 

Angela: The districts that really commit to documentation, have a building principal who not only believes in the work they elevate the work. And they're not necessarily able to be present for it. Um, in the system that I'm referencing right now, it's a, a school district where that building principal has worn many hats, um, and has been responsible for a whole bunch that most building principals may not be right. And so that principle has not always been present for full [00:21:00] days of our work. Um, but because we're documenting our learning that principal basically has a scrapbook. I've posted pictures of it online before, but teachers build scrapbook pages and we also, when we tell our stories about what we're noticing, I audio record all of that. 

Um, and everything lives in the professional development room. So the principal and other teachers can wander through and multimedia tools allow us to kind of distribute the learning and share it even, you know, when we're not present. Um, but it is that the building principal not only championed the work, trusted teachers, even though the certainty disappears. I say this all the time, quantitative data is very sturdy. It's very steady, and it can breed this false confidence, especially when we're afraid or we feel under pressure. [00:22:00] When I have a building principal who says, yep, by all means, let's just dive in and let's start studying this in a really purposeful and systemic way with very clear strategies.

A building principal who's willing to say, yeah, we don't know, and we're not sure what we're gonna learn. But I trust my teachers to learn it with you. That is everything. Um, the biggest challenges and where it unravels is where people are afraid. Where the numbers are driving everything and where there is not, um, enough trust, I think, in teachers to do this work well or not enough value in the stories that come out. Um and they always do. Eventually the skeptics, when we're supported this way to do the work in a sustained way, skeptics always come around because the stories are the solutions. And when we test them in their [00:23:00] classrooms, they start to work. Um, and then what I is so important for me as a professional learning facilitator is it's never about me coming in and delivering a solution or doing things to teachers. It's about me honoring them and listening to them and mirroring back to them what they're saying and thinking and doing, um, and listening to students. And then my relationship with people, um, grows that way as well. 

Olivia: The stories are the solutions. So that means then we need to do some documentation of the stories. 

Angela: Yes. 

Olivia: I've heard you say that we need, or you use audio recordings. Um, which is invaluable. I have loved lately playing around with OneNote because I very much appreciate how you can talk in the audio recordings, you can talk in photographs and have different pages for districts or, um, bigger [00:24:00] systems. What, you know, how when you're working with a district, the nitty gritty of documentation, are you all in a shared Google Doc? You know, how are you navigating that as a team? 

Angela: So it depends on where I am and what tools they prefer to use. I work in many systems where Google Docs is where we're storing a lot of that documentation. I work in schools that use Unrulr and I use Unrulr in my own practice too, which looks a lot like Instagram, Um, and kids can have access to it, parents can have access. Um, I believe, uh, Seesaw definitely. Right. And it's similar, um, and more for the littles, but. Um, there are systems that use wider and more open documentation tools where we're all doing that digitally. Um, I love Jessica Vance's Learning Walls, and we've used, uh, they're a great spin off of documentation panels, which is the, the heart [00:25:00] of the learning and work that I've done in Reggio Emilia.

I use documentation panels. Those are really. Inspiring to other teachers that are not in the room. And kids love them too. When the teachers start to make their thinking about what they're seeing on that documentation panel visible, and students and colleagues start to realize that they're really assuming a learning posture, not an evaluative posture, um, that's a game changer. But Google Docs is, um, a go-to in many places where I work. I also love Otter.ai, which is a speech to text app. Um, it's AI augmented and it does an excellent job coding audio transcripts, so I can have 40 hours of recorded interviews with teachers. And, um, I know this because, and it happened by accident. Usually I will reserve almost the entire month of June and the entire month of like [00:26:00] mid-December to mid-January. To transcribing and coding the data and transcripts.  

Olivia: That does not sound fun. 

Angela: It is not. It is a headache. And I've done this every year for years and years and years, and what comes out is really important. It's very, very meaningful stuff. So, um, it was just, I think it was not last year, maybe two years ago, spent a week doing that for a district. And I'm looking at Otter and all of a sudden there's another tab there that I didn't notice before and I clicked on it. And all of the coding was basically there and the summary was basically there and I had my own to compare it to because I did it not knowing it was very accurate. And I've done that a few more times now. 

Olivia: Wow. Okay. 

Angela: Um, and, and a wonderful thing is this. I give that back to the teachers and I asked them to tell me if we got it right too. The powerful thing about using tools like that is it checks my [00:27:00] biases. We, we bring an awful lot of confirmation bias. I do individually in my own documentation work. Um, I love to use Otter in the car. On the way home, I'll just sort of talk to myself, um, or anytime I have a thought or something I'm noticing and I don't have, I wasn't planning to document, I just record. Um and Otter will go back through. I will take those transcripts if I have 40 of them, put them in a single doc. Feed them to AI with permission and consent and names removed. Um, it has been incredibly powerful in that particular way. 

Olivia: That's amazing. 

Angela: Yeah. It checks my biases. I think it's one of the silver linings in all of the worries that we have about artificial intelligence. 

Olivia: You said earlier that doing this documentation work has helped you learn about yourself, and I would even maybe push to develop your identity [00:28:00] and grow. And so you and I have talked about this before, that we need to constantly revisit what do we believe to be true as educators, as consultants, as coaches, so can you speak more to that? Let's circle back, because you mentioned that earlier. How does this work help you develop your own learning journey as well as plan professional learning for others?

Angela: So I think that as a young teacher, it was really important to me to things, right? And I think perhaps you too came up in a culture. Where teachers were heavily evaluated, you had to have an objective, and if you didn't meet it by the end of the class period, you were being observed. There were meant, it meant there was something wrong with the way that you were teaching. And we've all, you know, evolved quite a bit since then. But that baggage remains [00:29:00] and it's always been very important to me to not just be good at what I do but to belong and to be of use. 

And documentation helped me realize that people cared more about what I said, and people found me more credible when I was willing to wade into complexity, say, I don't know, and just study it with them and ask good questions, but more importantly. Listen very deeply and just kind of present things back to people and ask clarifying questions when. What documentation has taught me is that if I'm going to be a good learning facilitator, I need to be in partnership and in relationship with the people that I serve. I don't get to show up to a place [00:30:00] and impose my thinking on them and my big, bright ideas. Then just leave and think that that's gonna change anything. And I also don't get to push my way into a system. You know this. We need to earn our place, which I do be of use. Yeah. You belong, right? It it also took such a weight off of me. You mean I don't have to know the answers? I don't have to have absolute certainty here. I'm valued because I know how to help people deal with uncertainty and leverage it in order to learn really cool stuff that they didn't expect to. 

Olivia: What you're saying resonates so deeply with me because I remember the moment I was traveling all over the states and there was a moment where I was serving a new school district and I was working with other consultants. I [00:31:00] remember a teacher at the end of my session came up and said, I've never had someone say they don't know like you did. And I thought, oh, I did something wrong. And I realized she actually, because she saw my face, I have a very leaky face. And she paused and said, no, no, that, that's not bad. Um, and what I said is, you know, I, I am not sure I, I am gonna reach out to someone and get back to you. And I think that humbling moment for people to be vulnerable and say, I don't know, that is not just okay, that's what we want our students to see and live. And so I also really appreciate that you're speaking to and uplifting the idea of questions and listening. And I believe just like you, that when we're listening to the questions people are asking, that tells us - it's an indicator of their level of understanding.

So when I'm hearing questions come [00:32:00] from people, I am then gauging where do I go next? And you have to be responsive. And that's what I appreciate about your idea around documentation. It's not just writing things down, it's not just capturing, it's really leaning into the curiosity and the movement of learning. 

Angela: Yeah. So I think there's two things that you have me thinking about. As you're reflecting in this way, one is we've gotten ourselves into an awful lot of trouble by simply lifting and dropping best practices with certainty into classrooms. We see leaders do this and, and sort of, you know, pound the drum for best practices and then I've never taken a best practice and put it into a context and had it work the way that the originator said it was gonna work. That's so interesting. I have to study it. I [00:33:00] can remember way back when, big shout out to my, one of my friends and my former co-teacher, Kristin. We were just learning about differentiation and there was a lot of confusion and tension around it early on, and I remember her sitting on my porch and saying to me, we're gonna get this right because we're gonna keep doing it until we get it right. Yes. Practice, right? And I, I think about how many experts in the field, scholars whose research has just been incredible. The giants whose shoulders we've, we've stood on, how many of them get pushed onto pedestals that they didn't ask to be put on? And when people can't simply lift and drop what they've written about or published around, or presented on. They lift and drop it without studying it, without documenting their learning. It doesn't go well. 

Olivia: No. 

Angela: And then we make all sorts of assumptions and we push all sorts of theories out and we begin to condemn people and [00:34:00] destroy what really should be an opportunity for us to get more nuanced about something rather than just burning it to the ground. So when we're talking about things like certainty, and I don't know. Even when we're testing best practices, we need to maintain that beginner's mind, and we need to understand that in our context. We don't know and we won't know unless we're documenting our learning. And, and as John Hattie says, right, becoming students of our own teaching and making students, our teachers.

Olivia: Yeah. Uh, let's jump to lightning round. Are you ready? Sure. I'm so excited. Okay. Uh, so you've spoken to a few apps that I'm thrilled, but what is your best tool for documentation? My 

Angela: My best tool for documentation is Otter.ai and because I've mentioned that already, I'm also going to mention Unrulr, [00:35:00] the, the, um, app that I use um, and my students use to document their learning as well. Works like Instagram, so there's like an instant facility with it, especially with kids who are a little bit, um, older. 

Olivia: Awesome. 

Angela: Um, those two tools. Yeah, they're my favorites. 

Olivia: All right. What's the biggest mistake you see people making when it comes to documentation?

Angela: Thinking that they have to document perfectly in order for it to be meaningful. That if they miss a day or they miss a moment, that the whole thing is just no longer, you know, useful. Um, I always say it's more important to be present with learners than to document the learning in that moment. And you can always, at the end of the day on the way home, open up a speech to tech app and say, this is the moment I wish I could have caught. Right?

Olivia: What do you, what piece of advice would you give to someone that says, I don't have time for this. 

Angela: Pick one concept or one, um, focal point [00:36:00] and spend this year gathering what you can. The whole year. 

Olivia: Okay. The whole year. And so then I'll end. Last question. What is the most surprising thing you've learned about yourself through documentation?

Angela: I think the most surprising thing I've learned about myself through documentation, um, is that I don't have to be certain to be credible. 

Olivia: Oh, beautifully said. Beautifully said. And again, that's what we want. We want our students to be curious. We want them to be driven to figure things out. Uh, in this world. Uh, so I, I just, I appreciate you so much. I know for a fact people are going to want to get in touch with you to continue this conversation. 

Angela: Hope so. 

Olivia: Um, and how could they not? I follow you on social, I follow you on Insta specifically, uh, [00:37:00] more than anywhere else in LinkedIn as well. So where would you like people to find you and keep the conversation going?

Angela: So if you just Google my name, Angela Stockman, you'll get to my website and there, and I, I just had it overhauled. Thank you Chris McNaught. Um. So there's some good stuff there, but you can also find me by name on LinkedIn and on Instagram right now as well. Um, and you can email me, stockmanangela@gmail.com.

Olivia: Beautiful. Um, this has been, again, a moment in time for me and I just I'm documenting it in my mind, Angela and in my heart, and I am so excited for this episode to go out into the world because I think it's going to help a lot of practitioners. So thank you.

Angela: Olivia you were so generous to let me come and hang out with you. I was almost didn't sleep last night over this. I was chatting with my husband about it all day. So thank you so much. Um, I really hope that. You boosting this conversation. Um, we'll bring it [00:38:00] to people maybe who aren't aware or who are excited, but not knowing how to start. So thank you. Incredibly generous of you.

Olivia: Absolutely. Take care, friend. 

Angela: Thanks. 

Olivia: Schoolutions Teaching Strategies is created, produced, and edited by me, Olivia Wahl. Thank you to my older son Benjamin, who created the music playing in the background. You can follow and listen Schoolutions wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe to never miss an episode and watch on YouTube.

Thank you to my guest, Angela Stockman, for sharing how documentation can become our compass in the fog of overwhelming data collection. And here's my invitation. Send me an email at schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com and tell me one thing from this conversation that's shifting your thinking. Maybe start this week by picking one concept or skill that keeps showing up as a challenge in your classroom.

Don't try to document everything, just [00:39:00] audio. Record your reflections on the drive home about that one focal point. Do this for six weeks and see what patterns emerge. The stories you discover will become your solutions. And don't forget to tune in every Monday for the best research-backed coaching, and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better the lives of the children in your care. Stay tuned for my bonus episodes every Friday where I'll reflect and share connections to what I learned from the guest at week. See you then.