Annotations Partner-Share

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We can learn so much about active reading from exploring other people’s annotations. One of my favorite things to do in college was to buy used books full of someone else’s annotations so that I could engage not only with the text but also with someone else’s thoughts about it. This activity invites students to share and receive tips and tricks about annotating, particularly when there’s a guiding question or prompt they should be working toward answering.

Process

  1. Give students time to annotate a small excerpt of text, ideally with a prompt (so that the students have something specific to look for/annotate for)  
  2. Students share their annotations with a partner. They examine each other’s annotations without any disclaimers or explanation for 1-2 minutes. Partner A looks at Partner B’s annotations and vice versa. 
  3. Partner A speaks for 1 minute about what they notice about Partner B’s annotations. Then repeat with Partner B speaking about Partner A’s annotations. This is like the “See” round of a “See-Think-Wonder” – the students are merely making objective observations.
  4. Partner A and Partner B each get two minutes to explain their annotation approach to each other. Encourage the students to relate their annotations back to the guiding question, where possible, just to keep this as an anchor for the task. You want students to be thinking about purposeful annotation.   
  5. The students can follow up these explanations with warm and cool feedback about their partner’s annotations. Now they can move beyond what they see on an objective level, and move into what they like about the annotations and any suggestions they have for their partner, if any, to make the annotations more meaningful or efficient.
  6. Students answer the following reflective questions:
    • What did my partner see in the text that I did not in terms of literal understanding of the text? 
    • What did my partner see in the text that I did not in terms of authorial choices used throughout the text and how they help create meaning and feeling? 
    • What strategies did my partner use to annotate efficiently yet coherently (symbols, abbreviations, underlining/highlighting, etc.)? 
    • What will I do differently next time as a result of seeing someone else’s annotation style? 

Image by Kim Heimbuch from Pixabay