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Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic on how teaching with graphs is practical
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Introduction to Learner-Centered Spaces Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces podcast where we empower and inspire ownership of learning. Sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Starr Saxton and Crystal Frommert.
00:00:14
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In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators, both in and out of the classroom. This podcast is created for educators who want to learn more about how to make the shift toward learner-centered spaces for their students, schools, and districts, or education at large. The Learner-Centered Spaces podcast is a member of the Teach Better podcast network.
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Get ready to be inspired as we dive right into the conversation with today's guest.
Meet Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
00:00:48
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We are so excited to have four-time best-selling author and CEO of Storytelling with Data, Cole Nussbommer-Naflick. She helps people in organizations all over the world create graphs that tell compelling stories and influence change. Please welcome Cole to our show today. Hello.
00:01:10
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Hi Cole, we're so excited that you're with us. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got onto your current journey?
From Math to Storytelling with Data
00:01:16
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Yeah. Well, the current journey has taken a little bit of a directional change, but I think my general journey over the past two decades now has been really sharing what I've learned over time when it comes to how how to communicate in general and how to communicate data specifically to an audience.
00:01:39
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And so I had a career in mathematics, started in banking, worked at Google for a number of years on the people analytics team, and always really enjoyed the space where you can take numbers and complex approaches and ideas and convey those effectively and simply to get others to be able to understand something new or drive smarter decisions.
00:02:07
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ah So I spent a career doing that, started a company called Storytelling with Data about 12 years ago, where we primarily teach workshops to organizations where we'll go in, spend a day or multiple days with a team, really teaching them the fundamentals for communicating with data and graphs effectively.
Teaching Kids Data Literacy
00:02:28
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And then ever since having my own kids, and mine are now 12, 10, and eight, it really struck me that we could be teaching them this superpower a lot earlier than we typically do. Because this next generation of kids, they're going to be base they're going to be faced with more data than ever before. And when they're young and and curious and creative is such a fantastic time to really introduce them to analytical concepts. And so I wrote a book called Daphne Draws Data that really takes the same sorts of lessons that we teach adults ah when it comes to how to make a graph that makes sense and help other people understand something new using data and brings it to kids in a fun way.
00:03:20
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And so Daphne Draws Data is a picture book and it follows the heroine Daphne, who is a dragon who has this unique love of drawing data. And she gets made fun of by her brother for that not being dragony enough. And so she goes on an adventure to try to find somewhere where her talents are recognized and appreciated and where she fits in. So she goes on a journey, she goes to the jungle,
00:03:48
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underwater, outer space, each time meeting some new friends who are encountering a problem that she helps them solve by drawing data. i'm But we never use the word graph. It's very pictorial and fun. And I won't ruin the ending of the book, but after the story ends, there is a graph glossary.
00:04:12
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that goes into the different types of graphs that Daphne draws over the course of her adventures, bar charts, line graphs, scatter plots, pie charts, that really breaks apart what these are, how you can use them, when you might use them, and also has some activities for kids.
Creating Learner-Centered Environments with Data
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Really, the goal with this, again, is just to inspire kids and really bring the problem-solving analytical thinking skills ah to them that are going to serve them for anything that they want to do in life.
00:04:47
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Wow, that's really interesting. And i I think not only could kids really benefit from that, I think probably teachers can. And as you were speaking, I was thinking like, normally we ask the second question about what a learner-centered space looks like, feels like. But now um' I'm inclined to ask, how does data inform what a learner-centered space looks like? And how does using data to anchor that space, how does that make it feel sound and look?
00:05:15
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Well, this is where I think the learner created space. It prioritizes kids' curiosity and their interest and has has them be active participants in their learning journey. And Daphne Draws Data is designed really to foster this kind of environment by encouraging kids to ask their own questions, collect data that's relevant to their lives, and use graphs to find answers. That's really one distinction that I see between Daphne and her approach and what I've seen my kids come home with from school when it comes to how they're being exposed to graphs You know, they'll graph their candy at Halloween or the weather in December like we live in Wisconsin the the weather in December is cold But they've experienced that they don't need a graph to tell them
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Whereas if we can get them to collect data that's interesting to them and graph it to answer a question that they have, we can actually help arm them with information that they might use to do something differently. So for example, um I had my kids track their sleep over the course of a week, how much they slept,
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ah you know what their mood felt like in the morning, screen time, and some different things. And then at the end, we were able to ask questions and find patterns that they could then use. So my 12 year old, for example, says, oh, I think I need to go to bed earlier because I've noticed when I'm going to bed past nine o'clock, I feel kind of grumpy in the morning. Like that is amazing. If we can get kids to have those sorts of insights on their own,
00:06:58
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It really is a superpower and it engages kids in a way that I think how graphs are typically introduced in the school system maybe misses.
Integrating Graphs Across Subjects
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i As a math teacher, I have to say, Cole, i I really love this idea of bringing more graphical representation into the classroom and not just into the math classroom, but with other subjects as well. And I think it's a, I've had this conversation before with educators that statistics and graphical representation are sometimes overlooked. They're the last chapter in the textbook. yeah they' oh We'll do that in the spring or maybe we won't even get to it. right and it's It's a little bit dismissed and I love that it's being integrated. Do you have more ideas on how we could we as educators could incorporate graphs in our real world that we see? like For example, um stem and leaf plots.
00:07:57
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um My students have often grown like, why are we learning stem and leaf plots? Where are we ever going to use this? And honestly, for years I was teaching it and I didn't know. I didn't know where you would see stem and leaf plots in the real world. Well, you see them on train schedules, a train table. And I didn't know that because I don't live in a city that has trains. Now I do, but back then I did it. So do you have any other ideas of where we could expose students to real life graphs?
00:08:24
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Well, and I think that is the key is the practical application where because that's it's one area where I think how math is traditionally taught um and what could be approached maybe a little differently because math tends to have this very strict you know The answer is either right or wrong, or I had my 10-year-old come home the other day with his math test. And he'd worked out a problem, and he got to the right solution. But because he didn't work the steps in the way they wanted him to, it didn't count. And that can feel really frustrating to a child and to a parent, frankly. Whereas graphs offer this interesting
00:09:12
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other avenue I think into logical thinking and numbers and their application where there isn't a strictly right or wrong. Things can be approached creatively and you can make these really clear ties between what you can learn from the graph and practical application. ah So for example, I've been doing a lot of school visits recently where I read the book and then we always do some sort of interactive graphing.
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And I try to make it something that's going to be really relevant for the kids. So we'll either survey them ahead of time and actually use their self-reported data to make graphs. So let's see the things that we've surveyed kids on in the past. and These all come from the schools and the teachers, so things that they would be able to act on. One last week, we surveyed on what after-school activity would you like to see? Or we've had one that was, you what ah vegetarian option would you like to see added to the hot lunch menu?
00:10:10
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So cases where kids can actually have a voice through the way that they're providing data, and then they're able to take that data and analyze it, show it in a graph, and use that to say, oh, wait, here's the answer to the question. Like, oh, interesting. you know I chose this option for hot lunch, but most of my friends actually chose this other option. OK, now that makes sense when that's the one you see getting added to the hot lunch menu. Or last week I did a session at a school library And so we focused the things that we answered with data on things relevant to the library. So first, we talked about how often kids check out books from the library. it Is it all the time, sometimes, or rarely or never? And I had kids close their eyes and raise their hand for how often they check out their books. And we drew that in a pie chart. And so the biggest segment was sometimes, which is great, right? Most kids are checking out books.
00:11:06
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Occasionally we used it to drive some discussion on, you know, for the kids who aren't checking out books, are you reading? Where are you getting your reading material? And then we brainstormed about kids methods and strategies for choosing a book to check out from the library. And so the brainstorm is really fun because through that everybody's getting a chance to either suggest their idea or hopefully hear their method reflected in something that someone else suggests.
00:11:33
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ah So, you know, we pick a book based on the cover or by reading the description on the back or you get a recommendation from a friend or the librarian or your teacher.
Engaging Kids with Personalized Graphing Activities
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And then we did the same sort of blind survey where kids close their eyes and I read through the options and they raised their hand when I got to their favorite way to pick their next book to read. And then we graphed it and you get kids so engaged where they're like,
00:11:59
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rallying and cheering for their answer um and learning as they're doing it. And so we learned something that was unexpected to me, but the kids didn't seem surprised by it, which is that a lot of kids look to a series that they know and like when it comes to picking their next book. They figure over the course of that, we did so many things. We posed a question. We showed kids how you could answer that with data. We brainstormed different options and made sure that everyone's choices were represented. We gathered the data. We drew the data in a graph. We used the graph to answer a question. And through that, kids were able to maybe learn new ways to check out books or ideas that they'll use the next time that they go to the library.
00:12:45
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We did all of that in like a 15 minute segment. I love all the stuff where' where we're talking with young folks. um I was a high school teacher and in my journalism classes, part of what we did um for data visualization was infographics and different ways to take the the data um and information they were learning and make visual representations of them for a part of our publication. So I'm wondering, how do you shift your um your approach when you're working with 16, 17, 18-year-olds versus younger kiddos that the the picture book probably appeals to more. Yeah, it's what and the definitely drives data is really aimed at the like five to nine-year-old group. Though I will say I've gone to my older kids classrooms and even you know the sixth graders are pretty engaged with a Colorful Dragon, solving numbers with or solving problems with graphs.
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um It's interesting though, because my experience to date has been primarily either with adult learners or now with the little ones. And so I've got this gap but right now in terms of, I guess, books from my own repertoire to be able to recommend. But it's really, it's the same fundamental principles that underlie this for any age.
00:14:03
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which is you want to think about a question that you want to answer, something that's interesting to you. And I think that's really key for getting kids engaged and excited is to get them to have a stake in it. And one of the best ways to do that is starting with a question that matters to them, or in the case of high school students, have them come up with the interesting questions. And that's a place where you can brainstorm as a group or get kids into teams ah so that you get different voices and opinions represented. And you know for a given class, you could have kids brainstorm interesting questions on a given topic. And then as a group, prioritize which of those are going to be the most interesting to answer or that would you'd be able to answer by collecting data either you know from the group itself or by researching or experimenting in other ways.
00:15:01
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And then you help them structure what that experiment looks like ah so that they can ah either observe or collect the numbers that they're going to be able to use to answer that question. And then when it comes to graphs, you you can do some easy things once you know what you want to say with it to make sure that that information comes across to other people, which is ah you using color sparingly or other means of contrast to direct attention to where you want people to look and using words either in what you say or the words that you put physically with the graph or on the page or slide that tell people what you want them to see. So where to look and why to look there. And in that way you help then kids take what they've learned through their analysis and now convey it to other people.
00:15:51
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And you know you can take that further with having them present on it. And they're really, you could draw on these sorts of lessons for basically any age and any subject matter, which I think is some of the flexibility and power of it. And you've led to this a little bit in the conversation, um but we could elaborate more on, this is a really hard question just to warn you, but you might encounter a teacher.
Efficient Integration of Data Lessons
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who says, this is great, I think it's really cool, but I don't have time for this. I don't have time to do the brainstorming and the surveying and the conversations with my students to make graphs. How would you answer that pushback from from educators? that If you've heard it before, I'm not sure. I haven't heard it before. We have been with schools that have been engaged in this.
00:16:45
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um I mean, that's tough because to me what that sounds like is I don't have time to teach things in a way that's going to work well and engage kids. but um i doesn't It doesn't take a lot of time. And I guess one thing I would suggest to folks who have that reaction of, you know, I've got my lessons already planned out, I don't have time to reconfigure that or work this in, is one of the things that we're doing is just trying to make that really easy. And so on the supporting website that we have, DaphneDrawsData dot.com,
00:17:16
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There is a ton of support for teachers and parents, which includes videos that you can show in the classroom or videos that detail how to conduct activities like this. There are example, um, lessons and we're continuing to add to that over time to try to make it something that, you know, for someone that says, I'm not sure where to start, they could go there and either,
00:17:41
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watch something short or grab something from the activities that already exist there for use in the classroom. But I think the one of the ways to not have it feel like a huge time investment, I think, is to have the time investment be when you are teaching it in the classroom. And that's where you you can involve the students in the brainstorming. It doesn't have to be something that you do ahead of time. The library session that I described, there was no prep work other than know what questions I was going to ask going in. Everything we did happened in that space. So it was a 45-minute session altogether where I read Daphne Drod's data, which takes about 10 minutes.
00:18:24
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ah We did our graphing activity, which all told was about 15 minutes. And then I answered questions about the book and about the activity, which was another 15 minutes or so. So it doesn't it doesn't have to take a lot of planning, I think would be ah part of my response to that. And I do think that when you try this and you see it and get to experience how excited and engaged the kids are, ah then that fuels the energy to do more like it.
00:18:54
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So if you had the opportunity now and you started to touch upon this a little bit before, um like who who would you shout out in your journey in learning about data? um Are there resources, are there specific people that you would send folks to to to help them get a better data education and bring it into their classroom in a meaningful way?
00:19:19
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so I'm not sure that someone needs ah more data education to be able to bring the sorts of things that we've been talking about into the classroom. I think my shout out would be more to the educators in schools that we've worked with already who are embracing this and finding innovative ways to incorporate graphs and really intentional problem solving activities with kids into their curriculum and into their day to day with kids. Because again, this is a superpower that is going to help kids be able to i mean really tap into a couple of things that they're good at. Curious. They are fantastic at asking questions and drawing.
00:20:10
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is someplace where kids can be creative. And so when we can teach them to pair these two things and build their analytical critical thinking capability and problem solving skills and confidence in numbers along the way, I think it's going to be really powerful.
00:20:31
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Well, it has been wonderful hearing about the series, hearing about storytelling with data. And I think this is going to be really influential for teachers who who want ways to incorporate statistics and graphical representation into their classrooms. So I'm wondering where could our listeners learn more about you and learn more about Daphne in the book? Yes. So I'll put you to two different
Resources and Final Thoughts
00:20:54
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websites. The first is storytellingwithdata.com.
00:20:57
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ah So that's all of our things that are geared towards the grown-up population. So a ton of resources. You'll also find information on our workshops, but free resources as well, podcasts, YouTube channel, ah blog, books, all of that. and We also have an online story telling with data community for those who want to practice their skills in a helpful environment. And then for those who are teaching kids, I would point you to DaphneDrawsData.com, where you'll find all of those supporting materials that I mentioned, ah materials for teachers, support for parents, and activities for kids. Well, thank you so much. We will put all of those links in the show notes, and we hope um our listeners check it out and and bring the book into the classroom. Thank you so much, Cole, for your time today. Thanks for having me. Nice to speak with you.
00:21:54
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We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you'd like any additional information from the show, check out the show notes. Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio dot.com. You can follow us on X at MasteryForAll and LinkedIn in our Mastery Portfolio page.
00:22:16
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We'd love for you to engage with us. If you'd like to be a guest in the show or know someone who would be an inspiring guest, please fill out the survey found in the show notes. And we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.