Blog: Facilitation Tip – First Slide Print Out

When I facilitate a slow reveal graph, I take a little longer on the first slide. It’s the one with the graph in its most stripped down, decontextualized form. It’s often missing numbers, and labels, and the title. So why spend longer talking about something that has no information?

This is where I’m able to anchor students’ thinking to the shape of the data. This is where we can determine what the data does before deciding what it means. Dwelling in these early observations — a bar that towers over the others, or a curve that flattens and drops — builds the foundation for genuine sensemaking.

So on the first slide, I:

• Ask students: “what do you notice? What do you wonder?”
• Ask students to think independently for 20 seconds.
• Invite students to turn-and-talk while I circulate around the room, listening to student conversation.
• Elicit ideas from students, and annotate these ideas on the board.

You might recognize this sequence as think-pair-share.

Increasingly, I’ve been adding in a support that seems to increase the depth of ideas at this stage. Just before revealing the first slide, I distribute a printed copy of that slide to each of the students. Here’s an example of the print out next to the original:

What This Looks Like in a Classroom

I increase the amount of independent think time, and encourage students to annotate the page on their own.

As I walk around the class, I can observe some ideas. I see vocabulary that they are writing, and features that they are circling. I might ask a few students to clarify something — how did you decide which points to circle as outliers? — but, mostly, I’m quiet. I”m inventorying ideas that I would like to surface during the whole group discussion.

Then, I give students the opportunity to talk with a classmate or two before our group discussion. It’s an opportunity for students to rehearse what they might say, integrate a classmate’s thinking with their own, and for me to listen to and observe student thinking. Students often gesture to their paper while discussing ideas. It allows them to move fluidly between their oral descriptions and the visual representation.

The following work samples are from an 8th grade class, engaging in a slow reveal Comparing Working Hours and Salary in OECD Countries.

Another student recorded the idea that this is a “medium” negative association. I asked him to describe what it means to be “medium negative.” He said that it doesn’t feel like a strong association, but it also doesn’t feel like a weak association. So he introduced the term medium. We would discuss that with the class.

Here you can see how some of these ideas worked their way into an annotation. (This is actually a photo from the second slide; the first slide has black dots instead of country flags.)

You can see that we discussed the size of the data points, the ideas of outliers, clusters, the idea of association, and a potential line of best fit (which would be revised several times).

Why Use a First Slide Print Out

Using the first slide print out allows students to engage with the material in multiple ways. It allows English language learners to experiment with language in a written expression first, or even to make some notes to themselves in another language.

I also consider different areas, including attention, auditory processing, language, memory, and organization

Students are able to see the first slide more clearly with the handout, and also engage with it more directly using a writing tool, which increases their attention. Having these ideas already on the page can help them as they process what a classmates says, or what we discuss with the whole class. It also allows students the ability to organize some of their ideas, and to use that written record to assist their short term memory when speaking during the whole class discussion. Writing also helps encode ideas for longer retention.

Some Practical Advice

Make certain that there is something to indicate the orientation of the graph.
On the handout for the 8th graders, I typed “top of page.” When the quantities and scale and labels and titles are all removed, it’s hard to tell which way the graph should be positioned.

Check for legibility.
Are the axes easy to read? Are any words or labels that are on the first slide easy to read?

Color
How does the first slide look in black and white? If color is a key feature on the graph, and you are distributing a black and white printout, you will need to remind the students to look up at the projected graph in order to get all of the necessary information.

Expectations
Let students know your expectations. What is the purpose of using this print out? Will this be collected at the end? Can they make notes to themselves in other languages?

Download the slide directly.
When on the first slide, go to File –> Download –> and then choose your preferred format. I typically download the the first slide as a JPEG image, an then print it out. You could also download the whole deck as a PDF and print out only the first page.

Reflecting on this Facilitation Strategy

The first slide printout is a small addition to the routine, but it opens up the classroom in ways I didn’t expect. Students who might otherwise wait and listen are writing. Circling. Questioning. Students who have brilliant ideas that flit away as easily as they came have visual residue on the page to remind them of their thinking. The printed page increases the space for thinking, and that thinking shows up in the conversation that follows.