We’ve all had this experience: You hand your students a copy of the text and invite them to “annotate the text.” 

You’re expecting to see margins filled with student writing – making their thinking visible to both you and them. 

Instead, you see clean crisp margins. Not a written comment in sight. If you’re lucky, you might see students highlighting the text. If you’re luckier still, they’ll be highlighting just a few lines… but more likely, they’re highlighting entire paragraphs. 

So why aren’t they annotating? 

It’s not that they won’t; not that they don’t want to. It’s that they don’t know what to write. 

We’ve been reading pros for so long, we forget that annotation doesn’t come naturally to most people. It’s a learned skill that needs to be explicitly taught.

So how do you teach annotation?

You teach it step by step. 

At the beginning of the year, work with your class to create an annotation guide. Break down the steps of what good readers do. Making these habits visible for your students will help them understand what types of notes to take as they read. 

If you’re not sure where to begin, here are some steps to help:

Teach students to review what they already know before they start reading. They can write down what they know about the author, the time period, or what they read last if they’re continuing a longer text. For example, we start every new chapter by reviewing what’s been happening in the text so far. 

Ask students to make predictions. Making guesses about what they think will happen next pushes them into the author’s brain. Students ask themselves what would they make happen next if they were the author? This shift is key because it helps them step into the right headspace for analysis later on in the process. 

Invite Multiple Reads

Students tend to be eager to jump right in, but it can be invaluable to teach your students how to skim a text. If it’s a shorter text, like a poem or short story, teach students to skim the text for unfamiliar vocabulary words. They can circle those words as they go and discuss the words with classmates. Defining these words before reading the text helps students avoid unnecessary pauses and confusion.

Now it’s time to settle in for a true reading. Invite students to read the text, paying attention to main ideas and summarizing in the margins as they go. They can of course make predictions and other connections (reaching back to those first two topics you covered with them), but this first read should be focused around simply understanding what the text says on a surface level. Don’t make the mistake of asking students to do too much analysis the first time around. 

When students have a surface level understanding of the text, invite them to dig back in. This step is for making connections, writing their reactions in the margins, and noting figurative language and other author “tools” as they go. 

Does it really take this many steps to teach annotation well?

Yes! 

We forget that annotating the text – the first step to analyzing the text – is an incredibly complex task.

Asking students to complete all of these steps – reviewing, predicting, defining unknown words, connecting, and identifying literary devices – all at once only leads to frustration for students and teachers alike. 

If we want students to engage with the text, we have to make the space and the time in our busy class period for students to think, analyze, and connect.

Looking to read more about teaching reading strategies? Check out our blog post on the 7 Active Reading Strategies that improve reading comprehension. If you’re looking for some short texts to practice with, try Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech, “I Have a Dream” or Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb.”