Leaving Behind A Trail: The Traveling Text & Community Reading

Encourage students to expand their repertoire of ways to read and respond to literature.

KELSEY HAMMOND
Professional Development Coach
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​As someone who loves to read and write, one of my favorite things to do is annotate texts — whether it be a few scrawled words in the margins of my most beloved hardcover books or endless questions written on sticky notes falling out of flailing paperbacks, my annotations capture the spirit of my hyper-personal engagement with a text.

When I became an English teacher, I knew that I wanted my students to learn how to annotate, in part because I wanted them to capture their noticings and wonderings as they engaged in their own distinctive reading process. In “Literature as Exploration” (1995), Louise Rosenblatt wrote that every person has a unique, transactional experience when they read a text, in which they “live through” something special. I think of annotations like mementos of this special reading experience because they capture a moment in time in the transactional experience that would otherwise be lost. 

Every time we read a text, even if it’s one that we’ve read hundreds of times before, we encounter a new transactional experience. As we annotate and re-annotate texts, we leave behind a trail of our reading experiences: our questions, thoughts, and wonderings. I desperately wanted my students to develop that experiential, transactional trail of their reading processes. 

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The Traveling Text

Imagine my surprise when I discovered, as a new teacher, that my students often responded to my call for annotations with, “I don’t know how to annotate!” or “Can you tell me what to annotate for?” or, worst of all, “I hate annotating. It’s a waste of time.” I can recall my naive shock when I heard my students respond in this way. In a desperate attempt to show my students the value of annotating, I began tirelessly modeling annotation strategies and my own methods of annotation, but doing so yielded little success. 

With time, I developed an incredibly simple strategy for teaching my students to annotate. Essentially, I stopped teaching my students to annotate through direct instruction and, instead, encouraged them to teach one another. This instructional strategy was, in my teaching, a solution to the problem of students feeling like they “don’t know” how to annotate or that annotating has “no purpose.” I call this strategy The Traveling Text (download here).

The Traveling Text is simple, requires minimal teacher preparation, empowers students, builds community, and teaches annotation skills. And implementing this strategy with your students only takes four steps.

Choose four short sections or excerpts of text for students to read and annotate.
These sections of text can be taken from the same longer text, or can be isolated. I do recommend using four sections of text that are related in some way. Using the Traveling Text template, place each section of the text on a separate page (pages A, B, C, and D). These template pages include plenty of blank space in the margins for students to annotate. 

Place students into groups of four.
Each student begins with one page of text. Using a highlighter and a writing utensil, direct each student to write just one noticing, wondering, or question on the text in front of them. Make sure to encourage students to highlight a specific word, phrase, or sentence that inspired their annotation. 

Once every student in the group has added one annotation, have them pass their section of the text to the person on their right side.
​Now, each student has a new section of text with one of their classmates' annotations. The student should write a reply to the first student’s annotation. Then, the student should add their own new annotation. 

By the time the text has traveled to all four students in the group, there should be a chain of student annotations responding to one another.
​For older students, I encourage you to have the text travel around to each student more than once. It’s incredible to witness students engaging with each other’s personal annotations. 

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​The impact of The Traveling Text

In my teaching experience, here are some of the impacts of this strategy on my students and our classroom community: 

• Promoting belonging: when students are invited to respond to one another’s annotations, it promotes in them a new sense of themselves as intellectual members of an academic community. For students who are more introverted in verbal class discussions, this strategy can allow them to engage in a written dialogue with other students.
• Building students’ repertoire of responding to literature: as they read and respond to one another’s annotations, students’ repertoire of reading strategies expands. Perhaps this is because when we are given a window to see into others’ transactional reading experiences, they expand our own methods of responding to literature.
• Shifting the audience of annotations from teacher to fellow student: students no longer write annotations focused solely on identifying the literary elements that they think their English teacher wants them to find, like symbolism, for instance. Instead, their annotations become more honest, insightful, humorous, and personal, likely because students know that their peers will be reading them, not their teacher. 

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Teaching students to read for meaning (and for pleasure) is a daunting task. Often, our students come to us already feeling like they don’t know how to read and annotate literary texts in the “correct” way, one that highlights what a teacher or evaluator might be looking for. 

The Traveling Text creates possibilities for students to expand their own repertoire of ways to closely read and respond to literature. But, even more importantly, the strategy encourages students to experience a sense of intellectual community and belonging with their classmates as they share with one another written artifacts of their own transactional reading experiences.
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