Three ways to integrate annotation into the writing process that are inspired by our Annotated by the Author series.
A couple of years ago, we began a new series called Annotated by the Author, part of our Mentor Texts collection, in which we invite New York Times journalists, and winners of our student contests, to annotate their work, revealing the writing choices they made and explaining why they made them.
That series inspired Matthew Johnson, a writing teacher at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Mich., to have his students try annotating their own writing. Below, he tells us how this kind of self-annotation can benefit both students and teachers. He also shares three simple, yet impactful, ways students can “talk” to their own work.
If you’d like to learn more about teaching with Annotated by the Author, and our other Times mentor texts, join us at our live webinar on Thursday, Oct. 21, at 4 p.m. Eastern.
And if you have an idea for teaching with The Times, tell us about it here or browse our full collection of Reader Ideas.
— The Learning Network
How Students and Teachers Benefit From Students Annotating Their Own Writing
By Matthew Johnson
The first installment of The Learning Network’s Annotated by the Author series, where the science writer Nicholas St. Fleur dissects his article “Tiny Tyrannosaur Hints at How T. Rex Became King,” was an instant hit in my classes, and not just because it had a tiny dinosaur. For many students, the window into the motivations, methods and moves of a seasoned writer opened their eyes to what goes into professional writing and what their own writing can be.
Last year, The Learning Network began to have the winners of their student contests annotate their work, and, like the series, my instruction using these annotated pieces grew as well. We used Abel John’s discussion of citing evidence in his editorial “Collar the Cat” to help us define what makes a source useful and reputable. Varya Kluev’s and Elizabeth Phelps’s insights into descriptive writing were just right to seed a conversation about how to artfully extend metaphors. And just this fall, I shared Ananya Udaygiri’s explanation of why she picked Animal Crossing as the topic for her editorial to help some of my seniors pick the right college essay topics for them.
As I watched these students in the series so thoughtfully dissect their pieces time and again, I also began to wonder why we don’t regularly have students annotate their own work in the classroom. Suggesting that students annotate, or talk to, texts as they read is commonplace, but before the Annotated by the Author series, I’d never seen someone ask students to annotate their own writing. Then, last winter, after reading Maria Fernanda Benavides’s particularly insightful explanation of how she shifted her sentence structure to match her emotions in her narrative “Speechless,” I decided to try having my students annotate their own writing, and I haven’t looked back since.
The Benefits of Annotation for Students and for Teachers
For students, the potential positives of unpacking and explaining their own writing were instantly apparent and significant. These are some of the common advantages I found:
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Annotation develops metacognition. The act of annotation is the very definition of metacognition, which is when students think about their own thinking and processes. Engaging in this sort of metacognition has been shown to significantly improve student learning outcomes, in part because it requires students to actively engage in monitoring their own growth instead of relying on the teacher to do it for them.
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It positions students as active, serious participants in their own writing growth. Regular annotation of their work also recognizes students as purposeful writers and decision makers who have something to say about their craft, which is very different from how student writers are often approached. This recognition can be both empowering and motivating, especially for students who have often felt that their voices weren’t heard by those around them.
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And it makes students better readers. Annotating and unpacking their work can act as a safe training ground for students to learn to better dissect and discuss the work of others in workshops and peer review.
For teachers, student annotation can be equally useful, as it opens up the following opportunities:
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It helps us to see students’ thinking. Annotation allows teachers a glimpse into the students’ inner monologues about writing. These monologues can help teachers better plan and calibrate lessons so they meet the needs of students.
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It allows us to give more targeted feedback. Teachers can be more precise and responsive when providing feedback to and conferencing with students when that writing has annotations because they allow the teacher to see the student’s mind-set, process, understanding and motivations, and allow the teacher to respond accordingly.
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And it reduces our workload. Annotation helps students to more accurately self-assess their work, which can save teachers significant amounts of time when it comes to assessment, even as it helps students better understand and chart their own learning journey.
Three Ways to Have Students Annotate Their Work
Once one starts to look for them, there are numerous places where student annotations of their writing might yield such positive results — so many that I feel I am just scratching the surface. Still, over the last year, I’ve found some particular areas where they’ve made the biggest difference in my classes:
Short, Skills-Focused Assignments
Much of my grammar and rhetoric instruction involves students writing shorter papers where they use a certain grammatical and rhetorical skill in the context of their own writing. I’ve found this type of grammar instruction to be far more effective than the grammar worksheets I used to do, but for many years I also found it more time-consuming to read and assess those extra papers.
This all changed, though, when students started annotating the choices they made. For example, in my class, we do a short unit on the grammatical tools writers can use to add emphasis (colons, dashes, appositives, parallel structure, purposeful fragments and so on). To assess their understanding of these “emphasizers,” I have my students write a rant on any topic that they want and then use the comments feature on Google Docs to explain how, when and why they used the tools we discussed in class.
By using the highlighted comments as a guide, I can now assess these pieces faster because I know exactly where to look. I can also assess them better because I can see in students’ own words how well they understand the concept.
Pre-feedback Moments
Feedback, whether it is from teachers or peers, tends to be a one-way street where the reader responds to the writer and then the conversation largely stops. I have found that while that approach can yield some growth, both peer and teacher responses often have a far larger impact when they are true conversations, especially when they are initiated by the author.
This is why I now have my students write annotations before getting peer and teacher responses to let the reader know what they are thinking, questioning and needing. Here is how I prompt them to do that:
These annotations don’t take long, but they often add a great deal — acting as icebreakers for conversation, ensuring that students get the help they need, and establishing a clear foundation from which both parties can work as collaborators toward improving the student’s piece.
Final Draft Self-Evaluations
More and more educators are growing interested in the idea of having students do meaningful self-assessment of their work in class. Self-assessment adds an additional layer of reflection and metacognition, and it can free up teachers to give feedback in the formative, or early, stages of student work, where it is most effective. Further, students assessing their work first can act as a bulwark against the possibility that students will feel blindsided or injured by grades and assessments because the teacher can see how they feel about their work first.
The trouble with self-assessment is that many students are unaccustomed to doing it, which can lead to problems with accuracy and students feeling unsure about how to evaluate themselves. Requiring students to use annotations to support their specific assessments can help with both of these issues: The act of finding and explaining the scores means that they need to be grounded in evidence, and the very act of looking for that evidence can help to train students in how to better assess themselves.
Here is the slide I use to prompt these kinds of self-assessments:
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Annotation can be a potent tool for helping students become better and more savvy readers, so it makes sense that it would also be a potent tool for helping students to become better and more savvy writers. The secret I’ve found to using it, though, is that the annotation needs to be meaningful. As soon as it feels more like a hoop to be jumped through, as can sometimes happen with misapplied classroom-required annotations during reading, all of the advantages of annotating their own work vanish in an instant.
This is why I explain much of what I share above with my students as a way to make a case for the value of annotating one’s own writing. It is also why I now use the essays from The Learning Network’s Annotated by the Author series both as mentor texts for the craft of writing and for the craft of learning how to dissect one’s own work.
Because when it serves a thoughtful purpose, student annotation is one of the most exciting pedagogical tools I’ve found in a long time — one that opens students up to what revision and writing can be, opens up the teacher to providing better and faster feedback and assessment, and generally opens up powerful lines of communication between both parties that often lie dormant.
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2021-10-14 16:49:11Z
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