What we came up with was about as revolutionary as Czarist Russia: the 5 W’s. Our method of annotation needed a more intuitive foundation than last year’s effort, which was complicated even for our more proficient readers. To achieve this goal, the mechanics of annotation must be straightforward and clearly articulated. Marking the text should, ideally, help our struggling readers to better understand the narrative. For the majority of students in my urban middle school, the primary concern is reading comprehension. Over the summer, a colleague and I overhauled our lessons, with an emphasis on student interaction with the texts. However, we felt like our first experiments fell short of this potential. I hope you enjoyed our conversation around annotating texts with our students.In our previous joint post about annotation, Jody Passanisi and I both wrote about the potential we saw for this particular strategy in our history classrooms. This can be done for speaking or writing. If they are more advanced proficiency students, give them starters or stems and let them fill in the rest. If students need more scaffolding, give them frames. As your students complete some of the annotation tasks, have them share with partners with sentence frames and sentence starters. Get students SWRLing and moving to discourse with the appropriate scaffolds. If they are newcomers, I may skip the level 3s temporarily.ģ. I may have students make their own questions and tell them to use one level 1 question, one level 2, and one level 3. This reminded me of Costa's questions, which is an AVID technique. Ask them questions like, "What words demonstrate the setting of the story?" Connect it back to the standard or objective to give your questioning a purpose.Įsther also talked about using different levels of questions. For example, if you are looking for the setting of the text, have students circle or highlight the words that show the setting of the story. Give it a focus and do that with your questioning. It's not effective to just tell students to circle words they don't know and highlight the ones they recognize. Give your language and questioning a focus. She might start off with having students put a heart by something that they loved and leaving it at that until the next annotating task where another layer can be added on.Ģ. We talked about how she might have them do one annotation focus at a time and build on them as time goes by. Stand-by, overachieving self!Įsther helped remind me to calm it down a little and take baby steps. I have to tell myself to scale it back a little. For each task I have my students do, I want to make sure that we are practicing everything that we can which can be extremely overwhelming for students, especially newcomers. I am guilty of wanting to do all of the things all of the time. If you are a fellow high school teacher too, check out my membership for high school teachers here!ġ. Also, she has a great digital annotation tool on her Teachers Pay Teachers so that was a definite must for having a conversation around her annotation process. I knew it had to be with Esther since I really felt like she spoke my language with the high school newcomer thing. And to top it off, it gets students moving from the word to the discourse level, therefore aiding in the development of English language. I knew I wanted annotating to be a strategy to focus on for my mini-series about moving students beyond the word level because it is just such a rich strategy to use that can be a foundation for getting students to SWRL (speak, write, read, and listen). Tonight, I got to talk to fellow (and now former) high school newcomer teacher Esther Park about annotating texts with her multilingual learners.
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