For the love of all that is good- please stop highlighting!!

The title of this post may sound counter-intuitive, given all of my own experiences cramming for exams, yellow highlighter in hand, reviewing notes and flashcards separating the "important" from the "not so important" details. Really it seems quite asinine as I think of my own writing, both personal and academic (especially academic), since- isn't it all important? Don't we want our readers to just synthesize the information and make meaning, to really internalize what we have written in their own way?

This strategy of highlighting informational text just appears to be a surface level skill that demonstrates one’s ability to categorize pieces of information. Teachers: how often have you provided your students with a highlighter and ended up with papers that looked like this:

This poor, well-intentioned piece of non-fiction bloodied with yellow ink. How is one to know if this particular student understands the content any more now than he or she would have without this dreadful tool?

 So what, then, instead? Annotate the text with pens and pencils, of course! Expeditionary Learning has coined this practice providing “The Gist” of selected chunks of text. It is important that you model this practice for students so that they really understand and can apply the strategy on their own. While reading, students should stop at specified sections and paraphrase the information in their own words. This is also an opportunity to pull out unfamiliar words and to address new or confusing concepts, note questions, and to check in to see if it is necessary to re-read.

I may be able to read advanced level texts fluently, but if you give me a textbook on quantum-physics I may read through several pages without comprehending a single sentence (or word!). If I don’t stop to monitor my comprehension I will have wasted a lot of time by the time I get to the end before realizing I need to do it over and slow down a bit. Students need to do the same thing with the content area texts we provide. We can differentiate this task by allocating different length sections of texts for students to annotate. At first, it is helpful to assign this as a comprehension assignment, but ultimately the goal is that students will be able to do this on their own.

 I realize that we cannot expect students to write in all our text books. However, I suggest copying a page to demonstrate the strategy or using sticky notes to accomplish the same task. Here are some highlights student work using this annotating strategy with notes and stickys: