Using Annotations to Increase Student Engagement with Meaning
Krystyna Michael, Hostos Community College
Bio
Krystyna Michael is an Assistant Professor of English at Hostos Community College and the deputy director of the MA in DH program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Krystyna’s teaching and scholarship revolves around digital publishing and pedagogy and 19th century American literature and culture. Her most recent publications have appeared in the edited collection, Print Culture in The Americas (Bloomsbury Press) and The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers (Rebus Community).
Course Setting
Hostos is a two-year college in the South Bronx. This course was taught in an Early College program for advanced high school students at Lincoln Academy. The students come to Hostos and take college courses to earn an associates degree alongside their high school degree. The students are bright and motivated and sometimes overwhelmed with other work and responsibilities.
Problem of Practice
In my dual enrollment classes, I often struggle with developing activities that engage both students who have read and those who haven’t. When a significant number of students haven’t done the reading, discussion stalls out at the comprehension level, but when I spend a lot of time in class going over passages/the reading, I feel it’s unfair and boring for the students who did do the reading. In this fellowship, I worked on developing a collaborative annotation assignment to encourage students to be intrinsically motivated to keep up with the reading instead of a punitive, policing model. My focus question was: How can I design activities that motivate students to come to class prepared, having completed the reading, and ready to have high-level discussions?Strategy
I used a collaborative annotation activity to build students’ confidence with the course reading and push them below the surface of the text. I took a multi-staged approach by:
- Activating prior knowledge through think-pair-share of key concepts we went over the prior class, like close reading and poetic elements
- Modeling expectations and expert thinking by walking through how I build an argument from my own annotations on a poem
- Designing low-stakes practice as students completed individual annotations as homework and shared them
- Creating collaborative annotation assignments, in which students were put in groups and given two stanzas to annotate for 5 minutes. Next, they switched with another group and added to each others’ annotations, and then they switched back.
- Designing practice on building interpretation, so students used the annotations on their stanzas to write a claim about their stanzas
- Engaging in whole-class discussion to synthesize the interpretations and push towards a theme.
Documentation
Collaborative Annotation Activity
This was the in-class activity for cycle 1.
Weekly Assignment
This is the weekly assignment the collaborative annotation fed into.
Measuring Impact
Annotation Quality (formative)
Before the activity, many students identified features like repetition or rhyme without explaining their effect. After the activity, students began linking specific details to their effect to the meaning of the poem.
Written Interpretation (exit task)
Students wrote a sentence explaining the meaning of their assigned stanzas, and most students successfully moved beyond summary to make a solid claim that was tied to textual details. Compared to earlier work, claims showed more awareness of poetic elements, were more detailed, and showed awareness of how to build an argument in literary analysis.
Analysis
The collaborative annotation assignment was largely successful at addressing my Problem of Practice. I noticed more students seemed prepared for class discussion and they were also ready to dive into deeper analysis more quickly, I think because they had already been identifying literary elements and discussing them as part of their homework. I could also see before class where student activity had clustered in the reading, so that gave me a sense of where students were more interested in, or just more comfortable with, the text, so I knew where I could build on their existing interpretations and where to push them into new or deeper discussions.
Studying student data gave me the chance to pivot – when I saw students were mostly identifying literary devices but stopping short of moving on to the meaning of the text, I did a lesson on moving from observation to meaning that I think helped redirect their efforts. I still had a few students not doing the reading or the annotations; I might give more time in class to do some annotations next time.
Recommendation
I think collaborative annotations are a great thing for all CN or EC professors to employ. I recommend scaffolding within a discussion of annotation more broadly so students know why they’re doing it, in addition to what they’re being assigned.