Jason Nious:
One, two. Ready? Go stomp. Clap. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Clap, clap. Hit, hit. Clap. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Again. Stomp.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton. And that was Jason Nious kicking off the 2025 Deeper Learning Conference, accompanied by two other members of his body percussion group, Molodi. A couple hours before this performance, I sat down with Jason to talk about the journey that brought him here and about what he’s learned from dance and body percussion about connecting to young people in school. It was such a joy to talk to Jason, and I’m so pleased to be able to share a conversation with you. Let’s get into it. So I want to start by asking about your first experience with dance. Were you dancing at home?

Jason Nious:
No. No. Nothing. Nope. I think, what I found over time, we were riding in the back of my mom’s car, right?

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
In Germany. Military kids. And we’d beat on the windows, like kids are just beating on the desk, making little rhythms, and that’s what we would do, because there were long drives from Homburg to Ramstein, it’s an hour almost. So we’d make beats. So I did find that there was a rhythm in me. There was already something natural.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
Not a trained drummer. Still to this day, I’m not a trained drummer with sticks in hand, sitting at a set. Not at all. But, that was the first any kind of inkling into the arts, was, “Ph, there was some rhythm there.” Knuckles and wrists-

Alec Patton:
Was there music playing in the car or were you just like-

Jason Nious:
… We’d make it up.

Alec Patton:
… Yeah.

Jason Nious:
We’d make it up, because my mom had a 1978 buggy. And, how many days we had to push start that car in the German winter, it was cold. And me and my brother, we’d be out there, she’s like, “Okay, do it.” And we’d be running, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. So that car didn’t come with definitely no tape player, no way to play our own music. And the radio was German anyway. So yeah, it was us making our own music, and singing, and rapping, and just making up songs.

Alec Patton:
So where were you born? Where did you-

Jason Nious:
Born in Texas, military base, San Antonio. Yeah.

Alec Patton:
… Yeah.

Jason Nious:
That’s where both me and my brother were born. And I lived there one year, I think a year and a half as a baby, and then we started moving.

Alec Patton:
Got it.

Jason Nious:
So it was six years in California as a young, young kid. Germany was three years. Then a little summer in Arizona, then two years in Nebraska, and then those formative years of high school and college, that’s where I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Alec Patton:
Okay.

Jason Nious:
And then, that switched again later when I moved later after. As an adult, moved to New York for a couple of years, then to D.C. for five years, and then I moved to Vegas, and I’ve been in Vegas 18 years now.

Alec Patton:
Okay. That whirlwind tour, there’s a lot of those we’re going to touch on.

Jason Nious:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
But, I want to bring it back now to, so you were doing this dance performance of Rhythm Nation?

Jason Nious:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
Tell me about that.

Jason Nious:
It was an awards thing, right? Yes. PE students of the month. And for some reason, it was the Knowledge and Rhythm Nation, somebody came in and they taught us that, and it was part of the DARE program, Drug Abuse Resistance Education back in the day. And, we were selected to perform it. First time I had ever performed anything in life.

Alec Patton:
So you distinguished yourself in PE for some reason, and they’re like, “Great. As a reward, you have to do a dance routine.”

Jason Nious:
They think we can dance just because we could climb a rope. I don’t know where that part came from, but yes. And, when you say distinguish, what I was wired to do was always do the right thing, always do what adults told me, always try my best.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
So it was very, very nerdy, but that wasn’t outgoing, that was just do my job, and get a straight A, and do that. So that’s where that came from. And then, it threw me into the arts when they told us dance.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
Because I wasn’t writing in a journal, I wasn’t expressing myself. I was just always doing what I was told, until I wasn’t.

Alec Patton:
Do you remember something switching when you did that performance?

Jason Nious:
Not yet. Not really. No, I did not get the bug. No.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
Strong no. That was not my thing yet.

Alec Patton:
That’s so interesting.

Jason Nious:
It was actually through the sport of gymnastics, which when it clicked in my mind, so you practice, practice, practice, you’re not competing yet, you’re just doing all the basic foundation, all those classes. And then, I get into a competitive team. We were going to state, and regionals, and things. When it clicked in my mind that, “Oh, this is a performance for the judges.” As simple as that sounds, we had a little meet, it might’ve even been a mock competition, but the parents clapped. For some reason, on that day, I noticed.

Alec Patton:
Yep.

Jason Nious:
And I actually did a good routine on that day. I remember that. And they clapped. And for some reason, I think I saw one of the judges clapping, and it was something that tiny, all of my gymnastics changed, and everything that I was involved in, then it was like, “Ooh, start a step team.” That was the actual bug.

Alec Patton:
No way.

Jason Nious:
The sport of gymnastics equated it to a performance now.

Alec Patton:
So in high school in New Mexico, you start a step team, is that right?

Jason Nious:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
So New Mexico, not famous for having a big African-American presence. And, step not famous for having a non-African-American presence. So how’d that come about?

Jason Nious:
Saw it on TV, NAACP Awards. So when I saw it, everything inside of me said, “That’s me.” Something about I need to be there. It combined my worlds together. Something about that rhythm, something about the unity of men and women up on there yelling, shouting, full energy, precise. So even that militant background, everything was together in there. And again, me being a military kid, I tell people, I’m usually one of maybe two black kids in the room, especially in Germany and in Nebraska. It’s just not a lot of us. And, it was the same in New Mexico, where I think the statistic at that time was, it was less than 2%. It was 1.8% black people in the state.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
And it was the same thing in the schools, in the college, and everywhere. So yeah, I saw it on TV, I recorded it on VHS, I slowed that thing down, and I just learned everything that I could, because it just hit me hard.

Alec Patton:
So if somebody asked you at that point, “Do you feel like there’s an absence of African-American culture in your life?” Were you seeing it that way? Were you conscious that there was something that you were looking for?

Jason Nious:
I wasn’t conscious of it, but I knew something was missing. I was a kid, didn’t know what exactly it was. You’re just looking at the world upwards and things are coming down at you. And then, do as you’re told. Now, again, I would not trade that military experience at all. I would do all the things. And, if anything, we’d go to other countries. So yeah, it was culture shock. By the time I moved to New York and then D.C., especially D.C., oh yeah, there was some culture shock there. But, the consciousness as a kid, no, not to know that it was my community that I was missing. It was just something was missing. And then, when I started attaching to the art forms and the music, because we didn’t even have the music, the streams of what was coming back from the United States was so this one show, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby. So we didn’t get all of this block parties and everything else that was going on.

Alec Patton:
So you got to connect these pieces for me.

Jason Nious:
Okay.

Alec Patton:
You see this step performance at the NAWCP Awards, and you record it, and you watch it over and over again. You study it. You said you learned it, right?

Jason Nious:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And then, you go to your not very African-American high school.

Jason Nious:
Right, yeah. Hispanic, white, a smaller population of black.

Alec Patton:
And you’re like, “Let’s start a step team.”

Jason Nious:
Yep.

Alec Patton:
I mean, that is not the move of a full-on rule follower.

Jason Nious:
I’ve noticed that across my life too. Some people start with a business plan. I don’t. I didn’t. It was like, “Start with this impulse and then it will come.” So that’s how that one started. Yeah, my best friends became the step team, and then it branched out a little bit more.

Alec Patton:
Right.

Jason Nious:
We never used signs. We just word of mouth say, “Hey, meet us over here in the cafeteria after school.”

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And was it a black group of people, or was it a mixed race step team?

Jason Nious:
It was pretty much all black in high school on that step team. Yeah.

Alec Patton:
Were there other people who knew more about STEP than you did?

Jason Nious:
No. We were so experimental. We were just learning together. I showed them the video that I recorded. So it was really just about-

Alec Patton:
One video?

Jason Nious:
… That one video, that was the inspiration for everything.

Alec Patton:
That’s awesome.

Jason Nious:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
That’s really cool. Have you ever talked to your teammates about that afterwards? Because I’ll bet that meant a lot to a lot of people.

Jason Nious:
Yeah. Every now and then, when I go back to Albuquerque. And it wasn’t just the high school step team, it was really when I got to UNM and then we started another one, a whole different one. That one had this long-lasting impact that… Yeah.

Alec Patton:
So tell me about that.

Jason Nious:
Okay. So my high school step team was called Rage. And I remember one other friend, he was like, “Why do you call it Rage? Why are you so mad?” I said, “Yo, this is aggressive. We got to do this like so. We call us the rage steppers.” He said, “Why not the happy-go-lucky Steppers.” I said, “Did you just hear yourself? Because I heard it. You didn’t hear that? Okay.” So anyway, the college step team, we call it Rhythm Cartel, non-Greek, but we did charter it as an organization, so we can do things officially on campus, and hold events, and everything. That one was definitely multicultural. We had this Latino guy who does Flamenco and tap. There was a few other people of different races, mixed races, and everything. So yeah, we just wanted to do it. So we did it. But we’re this community style step team. It just felt good, because we were on stage having a ball.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Okay. So it seems like there’d been a big shift, where it was like, you’re doing theater and you’d had that experience of really bringing something out of nothing. Were you thinking percussion dance, stepping at that point? Were you thinking theater? What were you imagining was your next step?

Jason Nious:
My number one goal in life… Those two things are what my young mind attached to. I had gymnastics, it attached to that, and I was a gymnast, that was my identity. And then, stepping got introduced, and then we started a step team. So in high school, I’m looking at both, right? And in college, I’m doing both, NCAA gymnast and I got my step team there. The biggest goal with gymnastics is the Olympics, is what it is, right? With stepping, when I saw the show Stomp, the one with the trash, and the poles, and the brooms, that became my biggest goal in life. Our college team got cut. It was part of Title IX cuts that swept the nation. So it was the realizations like, “Okay. Probably not going to make this six-person Olympic team.” So it closed the door on that dream, that goal, and let that one go. But it moved on to, “I want to be in Stomp.” That was the thing that drove me after that.

Alec Patton:
Got it. Yeah. So did you move to New York to join Stomp?

Jason Nious:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
Wow.

Jason Nious:
To join Stomp. I was not in yet. It’s not like I auditioned, they gave me a job and then I moved.

Alec Patton:
Because it’s only one cast.

Jason Nious:
So while I was in college, still in New Mexico, there was an audition in San Francisco. I flew out there, rented a hotel, rented a car, went to the… So they do rounds, a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So if you get selected, then you’ll go on to Tuesday, and then it gets smaller, smaller. Because, at that time, they had lines around blocks. 1000 people are lined up. So they just need this elimination process. I got all the way to the end. And then, it was like, “No.” That was the first time with San Francisco. Next time, after I graduated UNM, and I moved to New York, my goal is to join Stomp, but I also had-

Alec Patton:
And you got close to that. So you did have a sense of, “I was almost there.”

Jason Nious:
… “I was almost there,” which was just enough of a carrot to keep going.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Nious:
So I get to the New York all the way through to the end, get to the final group, my friend who you casted based on characteristics, and skill sets, and everything. So we were going up for the same role. And, like you said, there’s only a limited number of casts. It’s not this unlimited thing, where, “Yeah, we can place you anywhere.” No, you can’t.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
So he got the job. That was my second time audition. I didn’t get it. So I’m living in New York, and I felt bad that I was like, “Oh, man.” But, I really started getting into a lot more theater, doing regional and going out for different auditions. And then, after that, Step Africa.

Alec Patton:
And that’s in D.C.

Jason Nious:
And that’s why I moved from New York to go down to D.C., because I got in to Step Africa.

Alec Patton:
Nice. Yeah. So was that your first big dance show that you were a part of?

Jason Nious:
Yes, definitely. Yeah. And the experience was, we were going on college tours, different universities all over the United States. And when we did international assignments, Brazil, South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar. And, remember that movie, the cartoon, the Disney, Madagascar? I’ll say, “I’m on this African island, this is crazy to me.” That was like another like, “Whoa, this is actually happening. This is real life right now.” So yeah, Step Africa, my goodness. And so, it was so good that I didn’t get into Stomp until my third time I auditioned, because I had all those five years with Step African in between.

Alec Patton:
I was born in D.C. And so, I’ve spent a lot of time in D.C. So what did you notice about being in a place that has a long-lasting, rich, significant black culture?

Jason Nious:
Mm-hmm. Chocolate city, straight up. I was like, “Whoa.” The diaspora. The things that I was being fed as a kid on TV were these icons on TV, Denzel, Oprah, and Bill Cosby. It was so small, plus a different world. Come on. Different world all day. So the diaspora, how we are in all parts of government, all parts of the embassy system, all these higher-ed, all of these different universities, all over the place. There was just way more than some of the stories that were coming through the media. The mass of the media stories were just negative, negative, negative, negative. I’m like, “Yo, everybody’s from a ghetto? Everybody’s getting off crack?” No. No is the truth.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
I’m just finally seeing for myself, and living amongst, and interacting with at a museum, at the Kennedy Center, at these places of just… And this was normal. The normalcy of it was what was hitting me as the culture shock in a good way. That’s what I started really ingesting. It’s like, “Oh, yeah.” Because at first, you’re like, “There might be a little…” Not saying impossible, “But do I belong here? How real is this? How long is this going to last?” But then, it’s like, “No, this is normal and this should be normal.”

Alec Patton:
There’s no way that you wouldn’t have felt like New Mexico and Germany were a different thing.

Jason Nious:
Yep. Not to overuse it, but where you basically are other all of your life, all of the time, you’re an anomaly. You’re other. Not to say you’re always treated bad, because that’s not the case. Sometimes, I don’t know if you know the term magical negro. It’s like, “Oh yeah, we can put that part in there, but they have to be magical, and supernatural, and this, and that, and this, and that.” So I’ve been on that side of the coin as well. But the normalcy of excellence is one of the things that I learned from being in D.C.

Alec Patton:
And I think the thing is that when you are other, unusual, whatever people are bringing, positive or negative to their interaction with you, people are bringing their idea about something.

Jason Nious:
Yep, yep, yep.

Alec Patton:
And so, you’re always figuring out, I imagine, “What preconceived notion is this person bringing?”

Jason Nious:
Right. Yeah. And that just gets complicated. I remember, many times, many times, there was an assumption that I grew up in the ghetto. As a normal thing, they said, “Oh, the black kid’s in the room.” And you see their head turn and just a little sorrow feel, and they frown their brow. And I’m like, “I was a military kid. I was a military brat. I was in Germany eating bratwurst. What are you talking about? No, let’s erase all of that. Let’s just come to the table and ask a question if you have a question, instead of all these assumptions. And I’ll do the same. This is how conversations work. Let’s do that.”

Alec Patton:
Yeah. All right. So Stomp happens.

Jason Nious:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
Third time.

Jason Nious:
The funny thing about that, I was feeling so good in D.C. I was fully into my identity myself. I was fully realized. The platform of Step Africa, how it nurtured me.

Alec Patton:
Mm-hmm.

Jason Nious:
Then the city of D.C., just how I worked, and how I started really, really, really planting roots there. And then, I go to Las Vegas and I audition for Stomp. And I threw it up to God. I was like, “Yo, this is number three. So I’m good on three. If they don’t want me, they just missing out.” And I just had this attitude. I feel great in D.C. I love the roots. Everything that I’m doing over there. I start getting nominated for awards and doing this, this, this. And I was building a real career out there. And then, I get Stomp. Then it’s like, “Yeah, we’re going to have to close all them doors, uproot you, put you back to rookie status. Let’s move you way over here and start over again. But you got your dream.” “Yeah. Okay, let’s do this.” So I rolled out, brand new, back to the bottom of the pile. Work, work, work, work, work. And then, yeah, reestablish.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. But what was it cool being on Stomp though?

Jason Nious:
Loved it. It was probably the most fun show and rewarding, because it was hard. Yes.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
My goodness. But yeah, yeah, yeah. To this day, I think that was one of the most rewarding shows I’ve ever been a part of.

Alec Patton:
So now, we’re getting to where Molodi comes from, right? Am I pronouncing that right?

Jason Nious:
Molodi.

Alec Patton:
Molodi.

Jason Nious:
Like, La Di Da Di, we like to party. Yeah. Molodi actually started before Vegas. It started while I was at UNM in Albuquerque.

Alec Patton:
Oh, okay.

Jason Nious:
Yeah. We had Rhythm Cartel in college. So Rage in high school. Rhythm Cartel in college. I also had one at my church, FNBC, where the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church step is. And then, as an offshoot of Rhythm Cartel, there were a handful of us, I think it was six of us, who just were continued to experiment and doing more and doing more. Then we started finding these little outlets at theaters, and showcases, and cabarets to just do a new routine, and do a new thing, and be on stage for 10 minutes. So that was the original Molodi. Then everybody graduates. Then I moved to New York. This one moves over there. This one moves over there. We start our careers. And then, six, seven years later, three of us find ourselves in the show Stomp in Las Vegas in the same cast.

Alec Patton:
Oh wow, that’s wild.

Jason Nious:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
That’s crazy.

Jason Nious:
And then, we decide in Las Vegas, “Let’s restart it.”

Alec Patton:
So, I mean, I don’t want to put too much on you here, but those other people, it seems unlikely if you hadn’t started Rhythm Cartel that they would be in Stomp.

Jason Nious:
One of them would have. But, yeah.

Alec Patton:
I mean, that’s huge.

Jason Nious:
Maybe not anybody else.

Alec Patton:
That’s like a wild thing that worked out.

Jason Nious:
Yeah, yeah. You don’t even know what you’re planting until later it reconnects.

Alec Patton:
So you’re all in Stomp. And, how did the idea of like, “Remember that thing we used to do?”

Jason Nious:
Right.

Alec Patton:
How’d that happen?

Jason Nious:
There’s a thing with the Vegas shows. I think it’s pretty much across the board, and I’ve done enough Las Vegas shows on the Strip to know what I’m talking about now. So I’ve done six different Cirque Soleil shows. I’ve done other shows on the Strip, like residencies and things like that. They use a portion of your talent and you get a lot of satisfaction. Then it becomes super-duper normal, where it’s like, “Oh yeah, here’s my job. I love my job. Let me do what I do.” But then, that creative spark in you starts to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Especially, because you’re doing the same show all the time. It doesn’t even really get boring, because there’s always something going on. There’s an injury, there’s a mistake, the lift didn’t work, this, this. There’s always things that keep the shows exciting. But, if you show up at 5, and you’re out by 11, that does mean that you have your whole first part of your day to do what you want.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Jason Nious:
So a lot of us were idle hands. We want to keep creating, so we keep on creating. So that’s where part of that came from. Going to entertainment directors of this cabaret space and this little small stage, not the 2000 seaters, but it might see 200 people in there, 100 people over here. Then they start creating events. Then they put a flyer out. And now, you get all of these world-class performers from all these shows on the Strip doing these small little cabarets all over the place. It was really just about creative expression. And there was a certain number of years where that culture was just so thick and that was prime for Molodi to say, “Yeah, well, let’s jump on in there.” And then, they started asking, I’d say, “Hey, can you come to the next one? Can you do the next one? Next one?”

Alec Patton:
And at some point, education comes into it.

Jason Nious:
Right. It does. Yeah. It just goes hand-in-hand. That’s what I found over time. When I was with Step Africa, it was like, half of our work was touring professional shows, half of it was staying in the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area, and doing arts education, and school shows, and not just shows where you sit there, you clap for me over here, it was integrated with why are these arts important? What does it really do for self-confidence, and identity, and all of the things that are sparking in all these different ways? We have to start putting language to it. It’s like, “Yeah, that’s what it does.”

Alec Patton:
So Molodi is doing these cabaret things. How’d the idea come to take that into school schools?

Jason Nious:
The opportunity came when my cousin Sunsuri, she was living in California, and then she had some connections with the school district and she said, “Hey, they want you to do an assembly.” I was like, “Oh, yeah, I already know how to do assembly. Let’s put this together.” So then, we took a batch of us, we went up there, and we started doing some assemblies at the few schools that she did. And then, we started getting a few schools in Vegas, and then the Smith Center, our local performing arts center, the Broadway Touring Outlet, they noticed, because they have an arts education outreach program. And they were like, “We’ve been watching you. And we want you to come in and we want you to basically be one of our artists in residence.” So now, I didn’t have to do all the booking, all that-

Alec Patton:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Nious:
… It’s like, okay, they just send us an assignment. And so then, it just grew, and grew, and grew, and grew. So now, every school in Vegas knows who we are.

Alec Patton:
When you started working in schools, what did you notice about the kids? What struck you?

Jason Nious:
Kids want discipline. This happens to be a dance form that is very loud. It’s militant. It is ingrained with a lot of discipline that’s not about, be quiet. It’s really about, be louder. And so, there’s something about that outlet, and then how we’re talking to them, and yelling, and they know that it’s a persona, right? I said, “I’m putting on this character.” They’re not crying or anything.

Alec Patton:
Who’s the character who’s yelling at the kids?

Jason Nious:
Oh no, he’s a straight-up drill sergeant. He’s like, “Attention! You…”

Alec Patton:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Nious:
We’re going around and we’re just taking on this persona. And, of course, we embed it with jokes. We make it fun. But, we are helping them to understand their control of their own body. Can you control your body? That’s the number one. You hear any sound and your body turns. It’s like, “No. Can you stay focused? Can you keep your arms straight? Did you know that your fingers are out right now? No. Make fists. Back straight.”
You do it even inside of one assembly. They’re only with us for 45 to 50 minutes, right? But there’s three to four repetitions of this one thing that they have this control of themselves, their bodies, because they’re looking at us model it. They’re listening to us talk about why it’s important, “Uh-uh, you’re not with the rest of the team. Your arms are down. Is that a straight line? Boom, boom, boom. Okay, cool.” They’re like, “I’m important.” That’s what’s coming. “I’m important. Oh, let me pay more attention to what I can do and what I can control.” That but from the beginning of an assembly, 45 minutes to the end of the assembly and their excitement, and then we hear back from teachers and parents all the time, “Why is my boy over here clapping and stomping? I don’t know what the rhythm is. He off beat. I don’t know. But he’s just excited. He’s happy. Then I heard it was a Molodi show, came to his school, and this, this, this happened.”
So this passion grows, this thing grows. “I can do that,” grows. So now, that can bleed into any other thing. If I see a thing and want to try, “Let me try it. Let me try it.” Because we’re teaching them how to learn that scary thing or that other thing way over there. “Here’s a pathway. Well, let’s just try it. Let’s break it down. Let’s do it again.” So even in that short little time, they’re learning that seed of how to learn and how to get passionate about it.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. From the way that you interact with kids and what you do, what do you think would be helpful to teachers who aren’t necessarily teaching PE, they’re not teaching dance, they’re teaching math, they’re teaching history? What can they take from what you’ve learned?

Jason Nious:
Use who you are in the classroom, because it’s the truth. One of my good friends, she was a substitute teacher, then she became a perma-sub. So she was there for four months through the end of school year when the other teacher quit. So that was a high school. So you got this, “I’m too cool for school.” Just disconnected and just taking this easy little class just to get past it, whatever. The way that she engaged with her corny jokes. It’s not about dancing and being this show person, the show woman, show men and everything. She’s just, “No, I’m going to start with a corny joke every single morning.” They started melting these, “Too cool for school.” For real, for real.

Alec Patton:
Mm-hmm.

Jason Nious:
“Hey Miss, where’s the joke?” If she came in one day, she didn’t have a joke, they started writing their own jokes. What she was doing was connecting, because she was just being herself is the real thing. And maybe that’s for younger teachers who just graduated. Now they’re in their first or second year and they still think that by the book is… It’s like, “Yes, by the book, and do not start closing yourself off. That’s how you’re going to be connecting. And that’s why they’re going to start opening up. If you open up…”
Ms. Jenkins, she talks about herself in that way. “Ms. Jenkins is having a bad day and this is what it looks like. So can y’all please… The noise for real is not it. It’s not it today.” And she’d let them know what that feels like, what that sounds like, what that feels in her body. She’s taking her breath. She’s like, “I’m going to step out for 30 seconds, because I need a break.” Right? And she tells them, “This is what management looks like.” And they’re modeling that. And then, you see them start to do the same behaviors, because they’re learning all the time. So even in the good, the bad, the talented, the skills, everything that you have, you’re modeling all the time. So bring it, use it. Use it to empower your teaching and connection with those kids. Yeah.

Alec Patton:
I think that’s a perfect spot to end it. And you got to go soundcheck.

Jason Nious:
Yep.

Alec Patton:
Really appreciate it. Thank you, Jason Nious. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk. It’s been awesome.

Jason Nious:
All right, thank you. This was fun.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted by me, Alec Patton, with editing by Stan Alcorn. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Jason Nious for this conversation. You can find information about Jason’s work and about the Deeper Learning Conference in the show notes. Thanks for listening.