Slow Reveal Graphs Are Awesome

A lovely little way to learn about the world

Here’s a neat graph:

And here are two graphs from recent lessons in my curriculum:

There’s nothing wrong with these two graphs. They’re decent tools to teach the statistics standards in 7th grade. But they don’t capture a lot of the complexity of graphs that students will see in the future, and they don’t have much to teach students about the world.

Some areas of math are structured in a linear way. Addition should be learned before multiplication. Quadratics should be learned before higher-order polynomials. But not all math is nice and neat and linear, and statistics is particularly resistant to that linear structure.

Enter slow reveal graphs.

Slow reveal graphs are the brainchild of Jenna Laib, and they are brilliant.

I start by showing a slide with very little information:

Then I ask students what they notice. Super simple. I’m just looking for students to look at the graph and make a few observations. They write, then talk with a partner, then a few students share.

Next I show a bit more information:

Here I ask students what they can figure out. Maybe we try to guess what the graph represents, or just talk about some interesting features like the 24-hour time or the sharp jumps each hour. Low stress, but students often like this part the best and try to make a prediction before the full graph is revealed.

Then I show the full graph.

We talk about it a bit, answer any questions students have, and then students write to summarize the graph in their own words. This can be short, but it can also lead to some long and really fascinating conversations.

For the last six weeks of the school year, during our statistics and probability units, we are doing a slow reveal graph routine every day.¹ Jenna’s website has a ton of information about how to use the lessons. What I do is tailored to my routine: we do this every day, and while I’m happy to spend time talking about the graphs I don’t want the routine to drag on forever.

Seriously, go check out slowrevealgraphs.com. There are so many graphs, and each graph has a premade slide deck that does the slow reveal part for you. It takes only a few minutes to pull graphs for a dozen lessons.

Why Slow Reveal Graphs?

Here's a graph:

I asked my students what they noticed. They made a few observations. One student said, "it's facing the wrong way."

In school math, we tend to only show students a very small slice of what graphs can look like. That's partly for practical reasons, to keep things simple and manageable. But it really seems like a shame that this student thought the graph was facing the wrong way. She had mostly seen vertically-oriented bar graphs in school, but graphs can look lots of different ways in the world beyond school.

Statistics in school often misses the forest for the trees. Or maybe a better way to say it is, focusing on a handful of the trees that are the simplest to understand and analyze, and ignoring all the other weird but cool stuff in the forest. Students should look at lots of graphs! Of all the math I teach, graphs are one of the pieces of math students will interact with most outside the math classroom. We should strive to give students a rich and broad conception of all the different ways to represent data in the world.

(This is the full version of that last graph, by the way.)

Knowing Things Is Good

My district, like a lot of districts, has deemphasized science and social studies in elementary school. That’s a shame for a lot of reasons, and one is that students just don’t know much about the world.

Teaching kids stuff is great. I enjoy teaching math, but there's a lot in the world that's worth knowing besides math. I have no illusion that doing six weeks of slow reveal graphs is a substitute for years of science and social studies. But every little bit helps, and giving students a chance to be curious and learn something a bit off-the-wall in math class is a ton of fun.

The conversations we have about slow reveal graphs have shown me how hungry students are to learn about the world. Sometimes we end up on a tangent discussing whether George Washington could have met a Greenland shark that is still alive today, or watching a video of an ostrich running at full speed that turns into a conversation about evolution, or looking at a map of Antarctica. The students who are most interested in these conversations are often students who are quiet and reserved in other parts of math class. That’s awesome! I do not care in the slightest whether a student will use their newfound knowledge of long-lived Greenland sharks in a future job. That’s not the point. The point is to learn things, because learning things is good.

How to Get Started

Go to slowrevealgraphs.com. Again, huge shout out to Jenna Laib. The collection of graphs is incredible. You can steal my routine, or look at what Jenna suggests on the website, or come up with your own. Don’t overthink it. The slow reveal is a great way to get students thinking hard without giving everything away at the start. I’m not sure the other details matter that much, as long as students get to think about a wide range of graphs and learn some new stuff about the world.

One more graph, just because graphs are fun:

1. My class is all about routines. I start every class with a Do Now. Then we do some sort of math thinking routine. Then students grab a mini whiteboard and I do a prerequisite knowledge check. I wrote about the math thinking routines here, over three years ago. I have meant to update that post for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it in part because my routines haven’t changed much. I pick a routine, stick with it for 3-6 weeks, watch students get good at thinking in a new way, then move on to the next one. Slow reveal graphs are my final math thinking routine of the school year.