In the past, I have often assessed student understanding of these kinds of grammatical concepts with short, targeted freewrites, but the one persistent issue with this approach was that there were always some students with ambiguous understanding of the concepts. To assess student understanding of these “emphasizers,” I asked them to write a rant on any topic they wanted and then to use the comment feature on Google Docs to annotate and explain what tools they used and why (see example below). One example of this from this fall was when my classes did a short mini-unit on the tools writers can use for emphasis (colons, dashes, appositives, parallel structure, purposeful fragments, etc.). So far I have used student annotation the most in regards to targeted writes that focus on building one or two skills.

Here are some of the areas where this self-annotation has been the most effective: Shorter, Targeted Writing Assignments With all of this in mind, over the last year I have been experimenting with students annotating their own work in different contexts, and the results have been a bright spot in a year that is desperately in need to them.

It is also worth noting that during these incredibly time-crunched times, having students annotate their work can also be a time-saver for teachers because when the students talk first, the teacher can often simply affirm their choices and add minor nudges or course corrections, which usually takes far less time than trying to trying to decipher student choices or chart a course for them. I also like that asking students to explain their writing recognizes them as purposeful writers making meaningful decisions, which is very different from how student writers are often approached. The act of annotation is the very definition of metacognition and reflection, both of which have been shown to significantly improve student learning outcomes. And yet so many positives can come when students unpack and explain their own writing. Requiring students to write margin notes or “talk to the text” during reading is pretty common, but having students do the same with their own writing is incredibly rare. As I read through these students annotating their work, I began to wonder why having students annotate their own work isn’t regularly done in the classroom.

Annotate definition for students