This is Jennifer Gonzales, welcoming you to episode 227 of the cult of pedagogy podcast.

In this episode, we're going to talk about two effective classroom-tested ways to teach students

how to mark up and take notes on a text, also known as annotation. If you would probably see my handwriting on some of the pages, you'd also see lots of underlining, brackets around whole paragraphs and

check marks, question marks and exclamation points in the margins. The more of

these marks and notes a book has, the more I probably got out of it.

Every time I stopped to take a note or make a mark, I was processing what I read more deeply, making connections, reminding myself of things I wanted to remember later.

And when I need to return to one of those books to pull out some key information or ideas, I

flip through and look for those marks, knowing they'll serve as road maps to the things

that resonated most with me.

No one ever taught me to do this.

I think at some point I started noticing books with notes scribbled in them and I thought,

oh wow I didn't know you could do that.

And from then on if I owned a book, I was going to have a pen nearby when I read it.

In the world of literacy instruction, many teachers would

call this process annotation. It's a way of reading actively and making your

thinking visible and it can improve comprehension of challenging texts.

Although some people develop their own style of annotation independently,

presumably a natural outcome of regular exposure to good books and the permission to write in them,

others may benefit from some instruction.

While annotation is taught in many classrooms, the way it's taught can vary widely and some approaches work better than

others at helping students find an annotation style that works for them inside

and outside the classroom.

...