Annotations as Assessment

It is very refreshing to read a professional book about teaching reading through the workshop approach at the secondary level. Cris Tovani, in So What Do They Really Know? Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning (Stenhouse, 2011), describes her practice with high school students, and most examples are from ninth graders. Her students are diverse, some reading as much as six years below grade level and some several years above, and they are from varied cultural backgrounds. She teaches in the block schedule, with 100-minute classes. She has five sections with twenty to thirty students in each class. Knowing that Tovani is a full-time teacher with a normal teaching load adds weight to her information. I appreciate it when she says things like, "I probably should do it this way, but I don't have time, so I do it that way instead, and I still get the data I need." Instead of advice from researchers or literacy coaches or professors or full-time think-tankers, this is advice from the trenches. That adds credibility to her words of wisdom.

One suggestion Tovani makes is to use text annotations as assessment data. This is the second thing I've read in as many days about the value of annotating texts for both the student and the teacher. The other was from Smokey Daniels and Nancy Steineke's Texts and Lessons for Teaching Literature with 65 Fresh Mentor Texts (Heinemann, 2013). These authors insist that annotation is critical for showing thinking while reading. Daniels and Steineke provide a lesson specifically for teaching annotation, while Tovani provides examples of her own model and student samples to show the kinds of information a teacher can glean from annotated texts. Both books are very clear about how to teach annotation and what can be expected from students.

I know my high school expects students to annotate texts extensively from the tenth grade onward. However, in my eighth grade class, I have students use sticky notes or their Reading Notebook for responses instead of writing directly on or near the text. This has been somewhat successful, but only for students who are already comfortable responding with stickies. Most of my students avoid jotting notes while they read because they say it slows them down too much and they lose the flow of the story when they stop so often. I have accepted that as long as they stop periodically to respond in their Reading Notebook in a longer entry. Maybe I need to re-think this.

I was impressed with how easily Tovani was able to pull information from the annotations about where students struggled, where they got stuck, where they lost comprehension which then affected the rest of the piece, and where students were spot-on in their thinking. I got the impression that Tovani knew her students as readers much better than I know mine, despite my ernest attempts at reading conferences and comprehension spot-checks. I also marvelled at how quickly she could pull out these little gems from a few quickly jotted notes, and then spot a trend or gap or next step to address in the next lesson.

I think I will expect more annotations this year, probably still on sticky notes because students don't buy their texts. I will gather them more frequently, instead of only mid-way and unit end. I know I will need practice to see where students are successful and where they need support. All this will take time, but I think having visual evidence of their thinking will help students see their growth as thinkers, help me to give just-in-time instruction during conferences, and help parents to understand the kind of reading work we are doing in class. That's a lot of bang for one small change.