Most faculty members have a go-to activity that can be deployed at a moment’s notice in the classroom. It might be a quick, five-minute writing task or a more-ambitious, small-group exercise. When students are struggling to grasp a topic or their attention is lagging, these activities can quickly get things back on track.
Such back-pocket activities also come in handy when teaching-preparation time has been squeezed. During those weeks of the semester when all the committee chairs decide to schedule meetings during your normal prep time, and your kid has a fever at home, and it’s the 12th week of the spring semester and you are so done with this academic year, it can be a comfort to know that you have a tried-and-true strategy to fill out some unplanned class time on any given day.
For me, the in-class activity that ticks both of those boxes — something that is good for student learning and helps me out when I have minimal prep time — is annotation. I ask students to annotate a short reading, such as a poem or a few paragraphs of a novel. My instructions for this activity are simple: “Your task is to annotate the crap out of this text. Quantity matters. Once we have lots of ideas, then we can start discriminating between which ones we think have staying power.”
The purpose of this activity is to generate themes that students can develop in greater detail in their independent work. So I encourage them not only to use traditional annotation practices — such as defining key terms or explaining complex phrases — but also to connect the passage to other contexts or even to their personal lives. If something in a poem reminds them about a story their grandfather likes to tell at holiday gatherings, great. Toss it in the idea bucket. You never know what will spark the rest of us to see something new in the text.
Although annotation skills can be developed on both print and digital texts (and should probably be practiced in both formats), I prefer to have students work on a printed handout with generous margins — meaning lots of room to write within and around the text. First students annotate on their own for three to five minutes, and then meet in small groups to compare notes for up to 10 minutes. When they are finished, I start soliciting volunteers and filling the white board with their responses.
Annotation exercises have proven to be a highly effective way to sharpen students’ close-reading skills, which will not only come in handy in college courses but in the workplace, too. But recently I encountered a new book that has helped me to think in even more expansive and creative ways about the practice of annotation.
Annotation was published last spring as part of the MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series, which offers short, accessible overviews on a wide range of topics with one-word titles like Happiness, Espionage, and Algorithms. The authors of Annotation are Remi Kalir, an associate professor of learning design and technology at the University of Colorado at Denver, and Antero Garcia, an associate professor of education at Stanford University.
Annotation can help any instructor to dream a little bigger about the role that this practice can play in teaching, whether in literature (my field) or other disciplines. Their book expands our understanding of the concept of annotation in two key ways:
- First, they define five benefits (what they call “affordances”) of annotation: “providing information, sharing commentary, sparking conversation, expressing power, and aiding learning.” If you are asking students to annotate their textbooks or articles solely for information purposes, Kalir and Garcia argue, you might lose sight of the ways in which annotation can enable students to talk back to their texts or resist the arguments of an author (or the teacher).
- The book’s second achievement is its generous interpretation of the contexts in which annotation is at play. I am used to thinking about annotation in reference to students making pencil marks on literary texts they are trying to interpret. But — as the authors demonstrate — that is a limited perspective. People can annotate almost everything: Yes, literary texts and textbooks, but also built environments, art works, musical scores, social-media posts, online texts, and more. If someone made it, someone else can annotate it.
Annotation provides plentiful examples: the interpretations of songs and lyrics on Genius, the deeply layered annotation practices of Talmudic interpretation, and even the reviews on Yelp of San Quentin State Prison. The authors describe the process of submitting their book manuscript to open peer review via PubPub. After the book was published, they continued the conversation on Twitter, inviting readers to share images of their annotations of the book and post examples of creative annotation practices using the hashtag #annoconvo.
Their generous survey includes a chapter focused on annotation and learning in education. Kalir and Garcia point out, rightly, that “annotation doesn’t invariably lead to better, more meaningful, or more engaged learning.” As with almost every teaching technique in the world, it depends on how it’s used. But quite a bit of research offers evidence that annotation practices — done well — can contribute to student learning.
Kalir and Garcia are especially enamored of the learning potential of social-annotation tools — like Hypothes.is — that allow users to annotate anything they find on the web and create threaded discussions. For example, a teacher could create a Hypothes.is overlay on a recent news article and ask students to contribute comments on it based on what they have learned in class. Then the instructor could use the digital annotations to spark an in-class discussion — or even expand the conversation to include people outside of the course.
I confess: The digital approach to annotation doesn’t sound much different from what I have always done in the physical classroom: Hand out a source text, ask students to annotate it on their own and in small groups, and then lead a class discussion. If that sounds familiar to you, too, you might have to move beyond the chapter on learning through annotation and instead look for inspiration in the many examples of annotation in the world that are presented throughout the book.
Or perhaps the book will encourage readers, as it encouraged me, to wonder how other educators are using annotation exercises in the classroom. When I began to poke around online to see what I could find, immediately I discovered an excellent essay in the Lesson Plans section of The New York Times. Written by Matthew Johnson, a Michigan high-school teacher, the essay recommends three ways to have students annotate their own written work and, in the process, become more aware of their writing skills and deficits.
My favorite of the three focused on using annotation to teach grammar and punctuation rules. Instead of the grammar worksheets he traditionally used, Johnson developed an assignment in which he asked students to write a “rant” on a topic of their choosing. Then Johnson asked them to annotate their essays by explaining how the tools of punctuation and sentence structure — “colons, dashes, appositives, parallel structure, purposeful fragments and so on” — helped them to emphasize key points in their rant.
It’s easy to see how this practice, developed in a writing classroom, could be used in many different contexts: After an exam, ask students to annotate things they missed in order to diagnose the gaps in their knowledge. On the first day of class, you could ask students to make five to 10 annotations to the syllabus (individually or in small groups), as a way to clarify course policies and answer questions about assignments.
Put Annotation on your summer-reading list. Spur a conversation with colleagues in your department about annotation and creative ways to use it as a teaching tool.
Or get your feet wet with social-annotation tools by annotating this essay, and see what you think of the experience. Here are my instructions: Annotate the crap out of this thing; talk to a peer; discuss.
