Social Reading

For the past twenty-some years, I have tried to find ways to help students become more active and engaged readers. Recently, I have been experimenting with some technological tools that have not only helped students to become better readers, but have helped them enjoy the process.

The most challenging text in Freshman English is Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. The language is rich, the plot complex, and the pace slow. I have tried many techniques to help students appreciate and comprehend this novel. One of the best ways was I created podcasts in which I taught the text as they read with me. Listening to the text and using their computer, phone, or mp3 player has been a real game changer to help students understand the text and provide an alternative to the many summary websites on the web.

For teenagers, it is all about the people. They like social networks, social events, but perhaps not social studies – or English. So a solitary activity, like reading, might be more attractive if it involved their friends.

A technique I have used that creates a social component to their reading is to take the pages of the novel, enlarge them, and put them on giant pieces of paper and have the students collaboratively annotate them. When using the “big paper,” I asked students to be completely silent and communicate only through their written comments on the page. Students would make the usual annotations; they would note characters, make connections, identify literary devices, and so on. But they were also able to answer each other’s questions and respond to each other’s comments. The big paper sessions not only provided a critical second reading, but also created a silent and social discussion of the text, a kind of low-tech chat board!

Last fall, I attended the National Council of Teachers of English’s convention in Washington, D.C. In a session on reading and writing digital texts, I was introduced to an iPad app called Subtext. Subtext allowed students to do what I was doing with the big paper with any text – and it could do more than that.

The problem was that my students don’t use iPads; they have Chromebooks. Rats! However, I found a way to take one of the main features of Subtext and provide it to my kids using our equipment and software.

While reading Romeo and Juliet, and A Tale of Two Cities, texts that are in the public domain and are freely available online, I copied the night’s reading assignment into a Google doc. I then invited my students to annotate the text using the comment function; our online collaborative social annotating experiment was born!

Students have responded very positively to this new way of reading! Sometimes, students read the work at home, and then come to class and annotate the collaborative documents together in class. Sometimes, they read and collaborate as homework.

Several months ago, I read an article by Grant Wiggins’ daughter, Alexis. When she shadowed a student at her new school, she realized how passive students are in class. At the end of the article, she reflects on how she would change her teaching given what she observed. She says that she would, “[a]sk every class to start with students’ Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night’s reading or the previous class’s discussion. I would ask them to come in to class and write them all on the board, and then, as a group, ask them to choose which one we start with and which ones need to be addressed.”

The collaborative reading document gave me a perfect opportunity to do what Ms. Wiggins was recommending. When students come to class, they review the collaborative annotations and use a second group document to write questions, claims, note quotations and start the discussion. We then let those responses guide and shape our conversation about the text. This process also provides my students with a chance to read complex texts a second time guided by their peers’ annotations. I struggle with the expectation that young readers will have the insight and inferential ability to glean great meaning from texts they have read after soccer practice or between math and science homework. This process lets them help each other to more fully explore and understand the literature – and they do it socially!

Students get to teach each other. They see each other’s annotations, answer each other’s questions, and respond to each other’s claims. My job is to give them the tools to do this – and then stand back and let them read and discuss - together!