Perhaps one of my most frequent reading lessons is teaching students to annotate -- or mark-up-- a text. No matter the format (book, article, digital text, pdf), I will spend time before the assignment reviewing how they will need to mark-up the text. It’s a lesson that is quite useful for a number of reasons.
First, it is important to get students into the habit of marking up all of their texts. The expectations are that the reading is just the first step in a larger lesson. In other words, the assignment is not the reading itself, it’s the activity or project or assessment that usually follows that reading. And to complete that activity or project or assessment, they will need to be able to refer back to important details, passages, and ideas from the text. Marking up that text then is a means to that larger end.
Second, the mark-ups themselves offer a considerable amount of insight into what the student understands-- or doesn’t understand-- of the text. I will frequently use the mark-ups as a formative assessment. In other words, I ask students to submit their annotations to me so that I can determine how -- or even if-- they are interacting with the text. I look to see that the student has variation in their types of annotations (e.g. summary, questions, connections, evaluations, predictions, identification) and that the annotations are evenly spread throughout the text. I learn a lot from these notations. If they just highlight passages, I know that they haven’t really engaged in the reading-- or haven’t demonstrated that engagement. If I find that they comment on insignificant details, they need help finding main ideas and using more of the clues within the text to find what those main ideas may be. I also look to see if they are able to draw inferences from the text and if they can comment on the structure of the text (organization, format, layout) or the writing style.
Third, regular lessons in annotating and marking up a text are great opportunities to teach reading skills. With each successive reading assignment, I will introduce, review or spotlight a type of annotation. So, I might start out with more generic instructions-- “Mark-up the text at least six times. Here are some ways to mark it up. . .” Then in future lessons, I will circle back and look more carefully at some of those types of markings. “Today’s reading has a unique organization to it. I want you to mark up this text at least six times, and I want at least one of those to comment on how the author has structured or organized the text.” Or “Authors usually pack a lot of information about characters in the opening pages of their novels. Today, I want you to annotate three characters and their descriptions.”
I do admit that students are not always huge fans of annotating a text. It takes extra time and mental effort. In fact, they might often feel that reading the text is difficult enough without having to do all of this extra work. I get that. I remember being annoyed with all of the extra tools (highlighters, post its, pens) I would need just to read an assignment. However, using those annotated texts as formatives is much more meaningful than creating study guides for students or asking them to answer a series of questions from the end of the chapter. Too often those activities get reduced to ping pong reading, where the student reads the questions, then bounces around in the text until they find the answer, and then bounces back to the next question and so forth. Of course, students could just as easily mark-up a text with lots of low level nonsense and not really understand its meaning, but I have found that students are more likely to work their way chronologically through a text when I ask them to annotate it versus when I ask them to answer a series of questions.
Annotating texts today is different from the way we have done it in the past. We have many more tools now, which is both good and bad. It’s good because it offers students options. It’s bad because some students are actually easily overwhelmed by options. Here are some tips for how to help students annotate texts.
Notability. By far, Notability has become the easiest way for students to annotate articles / pdfs. The program is very user friendly and it offers a lot of unique features. Students have also become quite familiar with the program, so there are not a lot of times when I feel as though I have to help students with it. I use Notability most frequently with either short chapters I have scanned or articles I have downloaded. I will also use it with a document that I have converted to a pdf. If possible, work on the layout of the pdf to maximize its white space or margins, since that is where students will be trying to fit their comments. Students can use Notability to annotate books as well. For this, they basically take pictures of passages and insert them into their Notability documents. It’s a little cumbersome, but if they do not like to use post it notes, it is a decent alternative.
Post It Notes. When it comes to annotating books, novels, and textbooks, post it notes are still the most preferred method. I usually set goals for students so that they can have an idea about how much they should be annotating. “Today, I want you to annotate at least three things in your reading. And by this point in the book, you should have somewhere between 10-15 annotations.” I also like to do an activity midway through the book, where students remove their post its from the book and then attach them to an 8.5X11 sheet of blank paper. I ask students to categorize the post its by type, so that they can evaluate the diversity of their annotations (e.g. vocabulary, character, plot, writing style, setting, theme).
Cornell Notes. I have discovered that some students simply prefer writing out their notes separately. I offer them the chance to demonstrate their ability to annotate a text using Cornell notes if that is their preferred system. More so than using post it notes, students using Cornell notes tend to copy down passages without comment. In other words, they will re-write phrases and sentences from the text without meaningful interaction. This can limit the effectiveness of annotation, since an important feature of annotation is that the reader is engaging with the text and processing its meaning. When readers are simply copying down passages and definitions, they do not always filter that information through those more developed cognitive processes. Cornell notetakers will need some extra guidance in this area.
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