 And welcome to Liquid Margins. This episode is Literacy and Learning with Social Annotation in High School. So glad you're here today. Today's guests are Morgan Jackson. She's a high school English teacher at Bishop Gorman High School, where she is on location right now with her beautiful burnt orange wall, which I love. And then we also have Joe Dillon. He's an English teacher and instructional coach at Gateway High School. And then our moderator today, and I'm about to turn it over to him, is Ramey Kallir. He's assistant professor of learning, design, and technology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development. I had to take a breath in that, it was long. And he's also our, I'm proud to say, our hypothesis scholar in residence. These are first ever. And maybe it's gonna be our all time desk. I don't know. I think so. Okay, and with that, I'm gonna turn it, I'm gonna stop sharing, I'm gonna turn it over to Ramey. So take it away. Well, greetings everyone. And thanks for those who are joining us today live. And we know that this will be recorded for those folks who wanna watch and compliment their professional learning down the road. I wanna begin by just, first of all, thanking hypothesis for bringing this important conversation forward and doing so at a really crucial time. This has really been a challenging academic year to state the obvious. And I think that we see kind of flavors of that even with today's wise panelists. Again, Morgan's joining us from school. Joe is, I believe, teaching students while he's also on the panel right now talking about multi-tasking and juggling amazing responsibilities. And I just wanna recognize, again, just the many, many sacrifices that students, their families, and also, of course, educators that have made this year, it's really been so, so hard and exhausting. And so with that being said, to be able to create a bit of a space to step back perhaps a little bit and talk about consequential teaching and learning and to talk about the ways in which social annotation contributes to literacy education and does so in meaningful ways for students and to learn again from educators like Morgan and Joe is really just a pleasure. So I wanna thank them in particular for taking the time to share their experience and their knowledge with us today. And we're gonna get to kind of kick things off in that way. And so maybe just for folks again who are with us right now, but who will be watching this and who may maybe be less familiar with where you teach and what you're teaching, Morgan, can you kind of give us a sense of like, what do you do day to day? Like where are you teaching and who are you teaching and what is a slice of your life look like as a literacy educator? Hi, yes, thank you so much for having me here. It's a pleasure to be a part of this conversation. I teach high school in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's a Catholic private school. I teach juniors and seniors. So a lot of what we do is not just within our literacy information, but also helping to kind of bridge that gap and prepare them to go off to college. So I'm trying to do two things at once, which is even more interesting when you throw in a pandemic and two thirds of your kids are at home online, possibly with their cameras on or not. So that's kind of my day to day is can I get your camera on and can I see someone's face other than just a little black box with a letter in it? Morgan, thank you so much. Joe, again, tell us a little bit about where you are and what you do day to day as a literacy educator. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, by the way. It's a pleasure to join this conversation. I teach English in Aurora, Colorado at Gateway High School. And sorry, do you need anything? Okay, I apologize. I'm doing triple duty. I have a child that I'm attending to and I'm helping out my niece. So anyway, I teach at Gateway High School in Aurora, Colorado. I'm also an instructional coach. So I support teachers across content areas, but primarily teachers new to the profession in areas where literacy is important. So this year, in particular at Gateway, I've been working with students who are needing an alternative program because they might be off track for graduation, sort of experience, sort of long time, lack of success in a traditional K-12 setting. And so increasingly this year, I'm trying to personalize the learning that students have to do when they seem like they have a high bar to clear in order to graduate high school and access their post-secondary goals and opportunities. And so it's good in the sense that we're trying to innovate as much as we can, while we're also being mindful of what our students are asking for and needing and then thinking about the implications for the work we do with those students who need our best every day. And how does the work we do inform the way we might personalize in a mainstream classroom? So that's generally the day-to-day. Joe, thank you. That's just really helpful to hear. So Morgan, take us a little bit into your practice as a literacy educator. And as you explained to us, perhaps about how you approach what is again, such an important aspect of student learning, where does annotation fit into that and why in your experience and in your expertise as an educator, have you found annotation or maybe social annotation specifically a useful compliment to what you do in your literacy classroom? I will say the first and foremost thing that I loved about it is particularly using hypothesis worked very well when we transitioned to online in March. Having students who were used to logging in, who knew what to do, allowed me to maintain a sense of community that was really hard to kind of create even this year with two thirds of my students online, having class discussions gets to be a little tricky, but being able to put something down where they can collaborate together and expand on each other's ideas really helps them to kind of come together and find that common ground. For my students, because they're juniors and seniors, a lot of them are social media heavy. It's kind of what they like. So for them, this actually taps into something they're already familiar with. They are used to the concept of looking at something collectively and sharing their ideas on it and then responding to each other's thoughts and kind of evaluating and growing that thought process together. So this takes kind of what they do outside of school and puts it in a format that works beautifully within school, which is already amazing. I also find that my classes are very boy heavy and discussions aren't always very conducive for boys. Just in that thought process, my girls tend to take over the conversations, but this allows for them to stop and think, and so everyone's kind of participating equally and no one's really being overwritten in a conversation because it's happening kind of simultaneously. So five people can be annotating at the same time and you're not talking over each other the way you would in an actual classroom discussion. So for me, it's really nice to have that element that makes a little bit more egalitarian in conversation. Interesting work and that's so fascinating. I want to pick up maybe more, and I think that we can maybe really riff a little bit more on this idea of kind of egalitarian participation, but if you don't mind, I actually want to follow up on a point you made earlier about the ways in which something like a specific social annotation technology like hypothesis is similar to the kinds of social media experiences and lives, right? That maybe we all are, but certainly high school students are living outside of school and how that then is a useful way of getting students into social annotation. I'd be curious, like when you first introduced something like hypothesis to your students, are they like, is there some confusion? Is there any resistance? Do they kind of like get it because they make that connection right away? Like how do you, for students who are like new to this idea of having, what sounds like actually very meaningful conversations in an online setting, how do you set that up for your students in the first place? I typically reserve my social annotations in the very beginning for things that are not curriculum related. So they're typically things that I find interesting that I think they should know about, but doesn't fit into my curriculum. So I think last year when I first started it, I did something with Barnes & Noble. They had the big kerfuffle about their black history and they did their, they redid classic covers, but they didn't change anything. So we use that article as like, let's talk about this and what's happening. It didn't fit into my curriculum specifically, but it was like, you should be aware of things that are going on in the world. So I try to do things that are gonna be high interest that they have an opinion on, but they actually really liked the fact that I can read this at my own pace and I can put it in my comments. And it's really kind of nice to be able to kind of sit there with it and think for a moment. And you don't feel like you're missing out on the conversation where someone says something in 10 minutes later, you're like, oh, that's right. I had something I wanted to say about that. Or the teacher gets around to you and you're like, I don't remember what I was gonna say. You can pass me. This allows them to kind of respond in real time with both of their own thoughts and respond to each other. So they really enjoy that process of, wait, I can say whatever I want and no one's gonna interrupt me and it can be as long as I want it to be or as short as I want it to be. And like, I can do it at home. I can finish it for homework. I'm not like on the spot. No one's looking at me. It changed things drastically for my students because the kids who won't raise their hand and speak are okay with people reading their words because you don't know when someone's reading your comment. When you're in class, everyone sees you and they look at you and they're like, what's Joe saying? But when Joe types it, he doesn't know if the person next to him is laughing at his comment or someone else's comment or the article itself. So it really opens that for them to just really kind of, it's a lot less personal in a way, but also more personal because they get to be their authentic selves but they don't have that necessary fear of like immediate judgment. Morgan, that's so fascinating. There's just already so much to unpack around it. Like again, as you said, high interest, which maybe is a kind of removes that barrier to like, well, I'm maybe using a new technology but I really want to talk about these like phenomenally tone deaf, if not kind of racist book covers. Like I want to do that. So then I'll just use this technology to kind of get into that conversation. I very much remember that. And I'm so just inspired to know that you were just like, come on students, it's not in the curriculum but like, let's have this conversation. And then of course all of this around social presence. So we'll keep riffing, but show bring us again into kind of your practice too. And for folks who are watching and it's important to know Morgan and I and Joe and I are connected in a variety of ways. And Joe and I have done some previous work together in a project that does leverage social annotation kind of outside of again, the formal school curriculum. But Joe, how does this kind of fit in with the ways in which you support literacy education in York and how you see again annotation generally supporting students of literacy education. Yeah, thank you for that question. I think so my setting of course is large public school district, right? And so what's interesting about the way social annotation works with hypothesis is we have to use a little bit. We have to do a little bit of hacking for my students to use hypothesis in our space. And so it's something I've used with students probably for the past four or five years but I'll get into the hacking piece in a little while but I do think that it introduces the notion that we sometimes have to sort of skirt the technical setups of the devices that the schools distribute to students. And also the notion that, hey, when we wanna make a decision about the learning environment, when it's digital, sometimes we have to look at, okay, how are we gonna do this? Is it gonna serve me as a learner? So the hacking conversation is one I'll share but I would say that probably more important than the hacking conversation for me is just the notion that I always think reading is best when it's social, right? I'm a bibliophile and I love to be alone with a book, but when you get 30 students in a room, particularly 30 teenagers in a room, the notion that 30 people sit alone with a book and alone with their thoughts is, it happens but it's not really what the situation dictates. And what's also true, I believe, is that I've been inspired by kind of the pedagogical practices that I learned about years ago in a presentation I heard from a professor named Sheridan Blau and right now he's at Teachers College in Columbia but I was attending an NCTE conference and he was just talking about the importance of the meaning that a class made and how that should be situated with the meaning that a teacher made of the text. And when I was a second year teacher or something, he was advancing the idea that he really liked to know what students thought about a text, what struck them as important, what was confusing, what were the points they wanted to discuss before he shared his own vantage point, right? And this notion was in the conference workshop that he shared it was a little controversial. I remember the conference was in New York and there were some private school teachers from New York and they were talking about, well, how are they gonna learn these things about the canon? And he was just pushing back that a teacher's meaning making, if it's situated alongside the students, really can, it can do different things depending on the learning community that the students and the teacher have formed and that if the teacher's reading always came first, then there might be sort of less reading going on among the students and they might not see their own reading as important. So I think that before I get into why we might have to use a tool like hypothesis in my classroom, I think it's important to know why I like to use other tools like chart paper and sticky notes and a really predictable chart that students might put their ideas on before I bring my ideas. And another thing that Blau said that I thought was pretty fascinating was when he would walk around and see his students reading and they weren't reading something the way he thought they thought they should or thought was correct, he always tried to check himself before he introduced the notion of an incorrect reading. And instead he liked to ask the question, why is it that I'm reading this text this way but you guys are reading it in a different way and situate the whole community with that question, right? And you can imagine that in any given classroom, a group of students might decide, well, that's because you're an old man, you have a master's degree, you do all this all the time and we don't want to. But more exciting answers are when the students identify that it's because they have a different perspective and that their interpretation like has validity for youth and maybe not for older men like myself. And the idea that if we think about it from a pedagogical standpoint that the students' meaning making might come first or alongside of students is, those are some of the driving principles. And then as I share sort of like, I've got Sheridan Blau's book, I won't plug him too much but I think it's important just to notice that over the years I've made a bunch of annotations in this book and when I talk to students about how I make meaning and why I might be reading something different than they do, I have to share my process and my process is authentically to use sticky notes. Morgan's might not be, but mine is. And if I share my own process and explain that, a lot of it's personal, then they also might decide that they need a personal process. And so that's when we can get into the hacking conversation. So the district likes it better when we socially annotate using Google tools, but those might not travel with us to higher ed, right? And so the idea that a student may want their high school notes to stay with them forever or they might wanna make some of those notes they've been making in class public because they wanna engage in a larger discourse. So those are some of the ways I like to think about annotation and we can circle back to hacking as you think it's important. No, that's awesome, Joan. Yes, and it's important to remind us that whether we're K-12, high school of higher ed, technical constraints, which are often social and policy constraints are very much the lives of all educators. But, Joan, as you were speaking, I was very much kind of, at least in my mind, resonating back to Morgan, what you mentioned a few moments ago on this idea of kind of egalitarian participation, which seems to, again, really kind of like align with or kind of seems attuned to Joe's emphasis also on perspective taking and kind of like personal meaning making processes, but my personal meaning making process can also then be brought into conversation with maybe your personal meaning making process. And again, it sounds like you really value that in your class. So Morgan, like, again, like, how do you encourage a kind of classroom culture that uses social annotation to kind of elicit these personal meanings and this kind of, again, as you said, egalitarian exchange, like, how do you make that happen? I'm gonna go with, Joan, I think, Joan's absolutely right when you talk about that meaning making. My biggest thing is I come from the perspective of I'm heavy reader response when it comes to students responding to things and that idea that I don't know. Like, I'm completely in agreement with Joe that it's not if I tell the students, if I'm gonna just tell them my thoughts on it, what's the point in them reading it? Like, they don't need to read it. They're just gonna sit and wait for me to tell them what it should mean. Or I discourage them because they read it, they have an opinion and I go, no, that's wrong. Okay, well, the next time they read, they're just reading to get done. They're no longer looking for those things. So I come from that perspective of I have an opinion based on the fact that I'm a 36-year-old woman who's married with two kids. Like, I shouldn't expect my 18-year-olds to have that same perspective. That's a very, like, it'd be very strange if my 18-year-olds had the exact same thought process that I have because we've lived so many different things. So I do think that that idea of allowing for meaning making is so important and allowing them the space of not seeing the teacher as the sage on the stage. I don't have to have the answers. I am very comfortable saying, let's ask my friend, Google, because I don't have the answers and I don't want them thinking that I know it all. I didn't memorize MLA formatting. I know to go to the Purdue Owl and look up, how do you use an in-text citation for this particular thing? So I want them to get comfortable with that idea of be okay not knowing. I'm okay not knowing, find the answer and the answer for me isn't going to be the answer for you. So I tend to teach in a lot of analogies. And the one I use when we talk about meaning making and social annotations is, what's the best way to cook a steak? The answer is how you like it. And so that's kind of how I approach that idea of meaning making. Well, can I say that if it's your opinion? Yes. Like you don't have to ask my permission for, well, can it mean that if you can support it with information from the text, it can mean anything you want it to mean. And social annotations for me allow students to not just hear the teacher's perspective. I think a lot of times the teacher stands up and they say, this is this, this and the other. And then does anyone else have another opinion? Well, I've already shared my opinion. So no one's going to give another opinion because I'm right, they're wrong. We've all seen Matilda, I'm smart, you know, I'm big, you're small. And it's that concept. So social annotations allows people to go, hey, there are other people who thought that was strange or hey, someone else noticed that thing that I maybe would not have ever gotten to but it helps them to feel a little less alone in their thinking and helps them see that there are other avenues of looking at things. So often it's here, let me tell you what's right. And it's hard to say, well, tell me your opinion but social annotations is a very safe way to explore and kind of voice something where you can say it and if you're not quite right, it's okay. No one's going to do the, and I'm not reading them in lifetime. In lifetime, if a kid raises their hand and says something, I can be like, well actually, but writing it down, it's going to take a long time for me to get through that. I typically don't even look at them until they've been working for about 20 or 30 minutes just so that I'm not focusing on like one or two people. I like to have a large number there but a lot of times when we start, I won't include my annotations, that's for them. That's for them to explore their thoughts and I may go through there and pull that into class and say, hey, some people said that, what do you guys think? Let's talk this through. Who agrees with this? As opposed to me going through necessarily grading, you're right, you're wrong. Nope, don't think so, try again. And that's really freeing for them. And it's something that they have to learn because by 11th or 12th grade, they're very, very stuck on, tell me the right answer, tell me what you want, that's what I will give you. So social annotations I'm able to bring in as a way of like getting them out of, looking for the right answer. The right answer is what you can prove. And this helps them to see that in a way that's very non-threatening. Morgan, I'm like, I can feel the wisdom, like emanating through the internet here. There's so much that's resonating and I thank you for just, you know, I've often when I've thought of and when I speak about annotation, I often will talk about the phrase of it makes thinking visible. But you just helped me to understand a quality of this that I was not kind of in rhythm with. And I just love what you said, Morgan, because it also resonates with so much of the past year. You said that a student's thinking, they're not thinking alone, I think maybe you said. Which is this idea then that I can think in community and I can kind of think with other people. So it's not just about making my thinking visible, which I can make my thinking visible, but then maybe nobody else is there, right? Nobody else comes by, nobody else shows up. But you're finding ways of facilitating and it sounds like through a very intentional decisions about your presence and your power and how you bring your opinion and expertise into the discursive space that you're really saying to students, don't just make your thinking visible, make your thinking communal and make it in gear. And that's really just so powerful, particularly as I think about the, please, please shut me up. No, Joe mentioned that idea of social and it's so funny because I think if you're, especially if you're dealing with high schoolers, the idea that they're gonna do anything by themselves is ridiculous. Like the idea that like as an adult, I don't wanna go see a movie that no one else has seen. So I see the movie and it's great. The first thing you do when you see something great is ask, oh my God, did you see blah, blah, blah, blah? And then we share it. Like that's why things trend on Twitter because it's a bunch of adults who want to share their thoughts on, oh my God, can you believe what happened? And so to expect high schoolers to not be there is so strange. Joe, please take off on this thread. This is just so lovely. Well, and I just appreciate some of the things that Morgan shared. One of the first things that, so much of what you said has resonated, but I think the notion that I hadn't considered, but again, it resonates as true as, hey, when you speak up in a Socratic circle as a teenager, like some of the students will hog that conversation and want to hold onto that mic. And some students turn beat red and it's just obvious that this is a painful experience for them, that people are looking at them. And it's true of some adults, but I would just say, like as we talk about the K-12 space, the idea of putting your ideas out there when they're in draft form can be a challenge. And so I just appreciate Morgan's noticing that, hey, this is alleviating a social emotional concern for some of my students to do draft thinking. Their peers probably wouldn't be as harsh with them as they might imagine when their faces are turning red, but still the concern is the same. And so Morgan has more insight as a teacher if she had pounded her fist and said, everyone must participate this way in My Socratic Circle, the innovation of, wait a second, this is alleviating concerns and showing me assets and thinking work that I otherwise wouldn't have seen. So I mean, I very much appreciate that. The other thing I want to say about the notion of social reading is, and it's a little bit of a topic that I saw come up in a Twitter conversation about your book, Rainey, your book that you co-authored with Ontario Garcia. And there was just a conversation, I think one of the readers that we know well, Kevin Hodgson had posted on Twitter, something about your discussion where you had talked about whether social annotations had value in like the genius space, right? And I think the book remarked that, with all these folks annotating lyrics on genius, there's the notion that there would be some annotations that would really add like helpful layers to the text and some that would seem less useful, right? And I think that what's interesting about that is it does spark a really powerful discussion about useful for who and for what, right? And that's a great thing to talk with high school kids about, right? We could go on about it with Twitter, but I like talking to the teenagers that I get to bump fists with. And I also think that when we have a perspective change about a text, we'll often see it among teenagers and the crowd before we'll see it from those of us who might think we know the correct sophisticated meaning. And I think you can point to something like to kill a mockingbird that's still really prevalent in a lot of high schools, right? But the important conversations that are happening in like a disrupt texts conversation, right? One, they're talking about whether and we should teach the book as much as we do. Awesome conversation. Also, I would imagine that because of that cultural conversation, everybody's reading that book differently, right? We like whatever we thought was the right answer, our answer key for to kill a mockingbird from 20 years ago is obsolete because we're all reading it differently. And that doesn't just happen with to kill a mockingbird. That happens with 40 year old poems, et cetera, right? The current moment informs readings and that says it should be. And at some point Harper Lee has handed it over to us and now it's our discussion. So I think the social aspects of it are really important. And again, things that may or may not spark a retired high school student on a Friday. These are, I think, fun things that I like to engage in as an English teacher. And so I'm glad to be able to be in conversation with you and Morgan about them. Yeah, there's just so much here to continue to unpack. And particularly, Joe, as you bring up this notion of like how these conversations change over time, which Morgan, you spoke to earlier, particularly as we have different perspectives in our own lives and in our own roles that also would of course shift over time as you were mentioning, Morgan, reading as a 30, 40, 50, 60 year old educator and maybe working with learners who are in their teens and just how the relevance of those conversations will resonate or not with learners of various ages. And then how do we, again, invite them to bring their interpretations and their opinions to the fore? It's just so critical and important. I could just listen to the both of you speak for hours and what I wanna do though, because again, we're coming at about 10 minutes till at least the official recording at this time. And we've already gotten one series of conversations, or excuse me, series of questions in the chat. I wanna bring that to the fore and have you both riff on that and then maybe we'll open this up for additional conversations. But I'm just gonna read this. This was sent by one of our attendees, Chris Long. And he says, a question I would love for the panelists to discuss would be how many students they would recommend to annotate a text together. So maybe a question here about class size and group size and do they do it with all their classes so everyone sees everything or do they break it again to smaller groups? And then finally, and this is the kind of third piece of this question, what kinds of preparation do you, Morgan and you, Joe, provide students so they have some strategies to try out as students initially begin the annotation process. So there's a few questions there, kind of take it at your pace, but I'd love to hear again from you both in response to Chris's question. Joe, I'm gonna let you go first because I am at school and the bell's gonna ring here a little bit and no one wants to hear that. Terrific, Morgan, I appreciate it. And you may have a more practical answer because I think you probably use hypothesis with larger groups of students at a time. And so my answer will be a little bit more like philosophical, how do I think about it? But you could probably follow up with however you like, of course, but maybe more practical answer than mine. I think that I would return to the notion of, the decisions of the community are best. And so I think that for me, how might I set it up? One, I usually set it up by asking a student to find a line that's interesting or important, a section that's interesting or important. And then to make a note about it and share it with a partner or something. Now, that may happen, it might be the kind of thing where I might set it up with, for example, what I often do in my classroom as I'm using paper tools is we're gonna highlight a text with a marker and then we're going to write with a sticky note and we're gonna fix that there. And one teenager might become more interested in the text because they see what another teenager has highlighted that they didn't choose to highlight. That noticing about what's important is a different conversation when it's a teenager to a teenager. And so then I think those two teenagers might decide, okay, after you have X amount of annotations, which ones should we make public for other folks? Those kinds of decisions. And there's other times where we certainly, we get the whole crowd of annotations all at once. I would say usage might vary. But the notion that there's some social discernment about, okay, now that we got some of this initial thinking down, what do we think should share? What do we think we should share? What do you think would add value or push the class's discussion of the text, the essential question, something like that? So for me, it's kind of like, what line is interesting? Why does it mean? Why does it matter? Those are initial notes. And if everybody has ideas about something important, what it means and why it matters, then the idea that we might collectively edit down to what do we think is most important for us to consider as a community? And then if they wanna go somewhere, the old man at the front of the room doesn't wanna go, I might say, why is it that I want us to go somewhere more academic and you guys wanna talk about what you're doing on Saturday? But I think that negotiation and that conversation is sort of the philosophical approach. I tend to do mine by class period. So I have anywhere from 20 to 30 students in one section and they're annotating at a time. I do have colleagues who have done smaller. We've totally did the idea of also doing like one where I have all of my seniors in one group as well so that you're working both with everyone or individually. I find that I like the smaller, like I like the class periods because if it's later in the day, like I have sixth period seniors, you want there to still be some novelty there. You want there to still be kind of an opportunity. It's almost a blank slate. So each period gets their own blank slate because I also don't want the first two periods or first two periods to skew with the later periods. Oh, well, everyone's saying this, so I'm just gonna say this too. So I kind of want them to start over fresh. We're a one-to-one school, so they have iPads. And what I've discovered is if they don't hit refresh, it only shows their annotations while they're working. So it kind of looks blank to them at first and then they can refresh and see what other people have done, which I like for them. Like I don't ever want them to fail. Like I don't want their peers to kind of become a pseudo teacher of I don't wanna disagree with the group. So I like breaking it down by class periods. In terms of how I prep them for it, I typically will require three annotations and I give them the idea of, you know, go with something that interests you, go with a question that you have, or sometimes it'll be something you agree with or something you disagree with. So as you're going through, what's something, especially for getting controversial, I'll say, what's something you disagree with with this? What's something you agree with with this? Just to kind of get them thinking outside of their own personal interests. I think it's very easy to become blinded by things. So to find something you disagree with because then they go in and respond to each other. And so when you have something you disagree with and people start responding, come start going, oh, wait, now I get. So that's how I set that up for them in terms of what they have to include. I tend to let them go with where they want. And the directions are you can't just say, I agree or I disagree. What specifically do you agree with? What specifically do you disagree with? Or, you know, what's your question specifically? And it gets really interesting. We read one on food deserts recently and I had a student goes, is it possible that hiring practices lead to food deserts? If you have more non-white people who work as laborers, would that then mean that they live in poorer neighborhoods and thus they have less access to much? And it was one of those thoughts that I hadn't gotten to, but it allowed her to really think through, you know, where this might be coming from and the other things. And it was a matter of, she goes, well, could it be? I'm like, it could be anything, you know, but getting her to think through how these things layer onto each other are things that I can't pull out of them in class. So I kind of like to blank slate it for them and not give them too much because I think I do a lot of that already in our regular class period. So this is really, I try, even if it's gonna tie into the crucible, I may do something about the witch trials or what a witch hunt is and let them go on their own and think about what they want. And then we may discuss it at the end or they may do a writing after we've read the crucible, tie it back in now based on what we've read. How's your opinion changed? Or go back now, we're gonna do the same hypothesis only this time I want you to do three new responses. And you see how things have grown and progressed. How are you synthesizing all of this information together over time? Can I ask a follow up question to that? That's really interesting. So do you find that as they, you know, do they end up annotating more without, you know, as the conversation becomes more, you know, richer and more vibrant? Do they kind of like get in there and really do it? I do. I think that they, I find that they annotate more. I find that it's always interesting because I'll have some students where I'm like, I would have never guessed this student had this thought process because I don't see it in class, but sitting there, like I get some things where I'm like, really? Like has this person been in my room all day? Like can you bring this kid to class with you? Like I want this kid to come to school. Where's he been? So they definitely go a little bit further. They're willing to, they get out of their friend group because we're a private school. A lot of them have known each other for a very long time. So if you were to be in groups and you were to do this, they'd group together. But because it's online, they're responding to other peoples. I've even seen some things where they've gotten really kind of territorial of like, well, can you guys stop responding to someone says because they already have a lot of responses. And like they want to spread that out and they want to make sure that everyone's thoughts are being heard and responded to. So it's a very interesting thing that happens. They take a lot of ownership of it. They don't like it when we start because we tend to do it once, maybe every couple of weeks. But by the end, they're kind of looking forward to, it's the one place where they can have an opinion. And so long as you don't call people names and as long as you're respectful, there are no real rules. So they're like, I can say anything I want about this and I'm not gonna get in trouble. So long as I'm, and I'm like, yeah, go for it. It's so long as you can support it with the text. And that allows so much. It's like the one place at school where they don't have to be on. Morgan, that's like, it's like blowing my mind. I know that's such a tried expression, but like what you just said is so revelatory. It's cause it is school and they are on, but yet you've created the space where it's so different for them. Anyway, it's just really inspiring. Hey, I'm gonna, it is definitely inspiring. I'm gonna interrupt us to say we are at 946. Morgan, do you have to teach? Joe, do you have to teach? I got someone to cover me for a little bit so that I would be available. So they are covering the beginning of my class and we're starting with reading. So we start every class with independent reading. They'll be happy to get a little bit extra reading time. They've been begging for it for about a month. Oh, great. Okay, well, yeah, if you want to, and Joe, if you can keep going for a little while, let's just keep going and then we'll wrap it up and then we'll end this. Yeah, do we have any questions? I know we still have some folks who are still watching with us live. Do we have questions or observations from folks? Maybe you want to drop those questions or observations into the chat. Give a moment for that. I have a few more back pocket questions, but yeah, I really kind of am at a bit of a loss for words with the wisdom that both Morgan and Joe are sharing with us today. But again, for those folks who are live, questions or observations that you'd like to contribute to the conversation while we hang out for a few more moments. This is Nate, our crowd has been a little quiet today, but I was really taken by Morgan talking about having students do anything they want, anything they want as long as they're supporting it from the text itself. And I'm just thinking about the way that all annotations start from an anchor in the text kind of encourages that locating the thinking in something that came from the text itself and sort of a almost like a technological mandate that forces everyone to start from the text itself as opposed from some other place. And I don't know if you guys want to riff on that at all or not, maybe there's nothing more to say. No, I will say that I definitely, going off of that idea, it definitely helps my students that have done it for two years. So my senior sister who started last year, they've gotten better at realizing that they're everything, you know, you're right. It's like, you need a concrete detail, you need a commentary. Like, well, how would I say about it? I'm like, it's just good conversation. You don't make an argument without a point. And it has helped with the annotating aspect of it to recognize that whether you realize it or not, there's something in the text that got you to this point. So like my juniors are reading the Crucible right now and they're like, I hate Abigail. Why do you hate Abigail? I just do. No, there's something that happened in the text that makes you hate her. What is it? So this allows them when you're talking about annotating, especially technology-wise, you really have to find that thing that got you to that point. And it does require a little bit of a metacognition thing of like, I'm feeling this sort of way. Let me go back and figure out like, how did I get here? So it's definitely the thinking about thinking about your thinking. Indeed. Morgan, again, thank you. I want to bring Laura into the conversation. Laura just shared this in chat and this is a book near and dear to my practice right now. And so, Laura, thank you for mentioning it. This is the book Cultivating Genius by Dr. Goldie Muhammad. And Laura mentions the importance of connecting social annotation with historically responsive literacy. I'm wondering, I think that actually you're both probably quite aware of, Joe and Morgan are probably very familiar with this text for maybe the reasons in which much of the work that maybe the waters and the literacy education waters that we swim in is being responsive now to trends, of course, not only in critical education at large but anti-racist pedagogy and again, cultures extending literacies. Maybe both of you could just comment briefly on the ways in which you do see the social annotation practices that you're participating in, connecting with this kind of a mentor text and the kinds of ideas that Goldie Muhammad has advocated and documented in a text like Cultivating Genius. I will jump on that really quick because it's a really quick point. I think I've long advocated that students sometimes suffer at writing because they don't have enough text to anchor their thoughts. As a well-read person, Joe, you said you're a bibliophile, you read something and you immediately start thinking about that documentary that you watch and that one article you read on this like that other book and this reminds me that you've got all these things that you're able to anchor new material to. To me, hypothesis, especially when I take it outside of just the realm of my curriculum, allows my students to now create new things they can anchor things to. So sometimes it's a matter of, they can't make that connection because there's nothing to connect to. So it's about giving them enough information that they can start to synthesize, like it's hard to synthesize with two pieces of information. So it's like exposing them to enough that there's enough there to synthesize with and discovering that when you give them enough material, they are able to pull from it. It's not a deficit of ability, it's a deficit of exposure. And so the more they're exposed to and the more they have, the more they can do with it. I can make amazing balloon animals, but if you don't give me a balloon, you're never gonna know that. So it's about giving them those tools to allow them to make those connections. In terms of being culturally relevant, again, you do allow for a lot of other people to speak. If you're in a predominantly anything environment, you allow your non-dominant group of voice that isn't going to be, isn't gonna be awkward. As someone who grew up and went to PWIs my entire life, it gets uncomfortable sometimes. But if I can write it and people aren't gonna stare at me when I say it, I can be a little bit more. I can go a little bit further because I don't have to deal with you looking at me. And your response, like, you're not gonna snicker. If you're snickering, I don't know what you're snickering at. Like it's not tied directly to me in that moment. Yeah, there's a few things I'd like to build on. And so I'll try to be focused about it. One, I really appreciated the impersonation Morgan briefly did of her student who was trying to say they have an opinion about a text but they weren't quite sure where that opinion came from. And then Morgan's assertion that, oh, no, of course you do. Of course it came from somewhere. And, you know, and so that's just a very key, like it's just a key interaction that talks about how a student might go from being passive to being more active, which I think would be related to being a gentile or feeling like they have agency as a reader, right? And that passivity of like, oh, no, I don't know. Like, aren't you done asking me questions? Wouldn't you rather ask one of my peers a question? And it's like, no, because, you know, when we're engaged, we all do this, right? Like we, all our thoughts are anchored somewhere in the text, even if our thought is about something that's uniquely personal and maybe a bird walk. So I really appreciate that. The other thing, and I have a little bit of a goofy story, but I was thinking about it as we, as I kept kind of fixating on the K part of the K-12 in the title for this webinar. And I was thinking about a story that stuck with me. It was an interaction that stuck with me years ago when I worked and I was working with a kindergarten teacher, a first year kindergarten teacher. So as a coach, I was, yeah, I might also be, because I have a kindergartner asking me why everything I've done all morning and checking in with me about how I attend meetings as compared to, right, my brother and my sister-in-law. So anyway, but the kindergartner, the kindergarten experience was I was helping a first year teacher who had really good mentors and support. So she didn't need me to be an expert on kindergarten teaching, which was good because my background at the time was middle school, but she had a problem one day when it was my time to come check in on her and see how things were going in her class, but she had, it was a new student. And this new student had come and needed to make friends in the middle of the year and a whole bunch of kindergartners and all kinds of social, emotional stuff going on and a kindergartner starts a new school and maybe a good problem, but a challenging problem for a kindergarten teacher because this kindergartner was reading books that were more like the books that the second graders were reading. And so what had happened was this new student was increasingly isolated. So it was no real problem to challenge the student because you could get her alone, read by herself, but the notion that she might not be part of a group was a real challenge for this first year teacher and it was just something that resonated with me. And in the moment, we had to troubleshoot it. And the idea that no reading group would suffice because they were all reading books that just weren't gonna, she was gonna read them too quickly. She'll stand out like a sore thumb. And so what I thought about was, with this first year teacher and we just tried something, we just brought a bunch of sticky notes. We said, well, let's slow her down, let's see how she writes about reading. And we'll put some sticky notes on the table, we'll give her a pencil and we'll see how it goes. Before we try to get her to go do a reading group in the second grade room, which is a whole another set of questions. So anyway, what was really impactful for me on that day was, of course this young girl was earnest to do a good job, wanted to know what she could write. And we said, you could write a question, you could write an opinion, or you could just write what happened. And that was good enough, she was good to go. And so as the teacher was instructing this reading group the way she always did, the girl grabbed a sticky note and started writing her ideas. And then the second time they stopped to talk about the book, the little boy next to her was a little ahead of the group as well and he went over and he reached and grabbed a sticky note. And I remember, it's like this little girl who was new to class and previously in this higher performing reading group, all of a sudden these, no kindergartener wanted to be left out with the sticky notes. And so there was just like this instant challenge to practice about like, what are we gonna do here? And it was really fun for me because one, it felt like we made the girl for that day a part of the group. And something interesting to puzzle over. We also left that group of kindergarten teachers some questions about how is this developing the writing and what do we see in the writing? What are the students doing in their response to reading? What are they getting ready to do? There's a question in the other kindergarten classes weren't asking until they had a problem to solve. And it was just fun. So that's how I think about the K part of social reading and social annotation. Can I just really quick, Joe? I think that works in any grade. I think that so often we focus so much on the reading aspect of it. And like, oh, we're reading this text. It's like, okay, but what else is happening? How are they processing the text? What are they dealing with the text? How are they working with the text? And so we go from reading the text to writing the essay. And if we stopped on any grade level and went through that process of what questions do you have? What's interesting? What do you think happened? We could mitigate a lot of our writing issues by having the process of their reading as they're going. And a lot of them would solve themselves because you'd have that one kid who doesn't know the other thing, but they know this one thing. Like it goes back to that concept where you said we talked about social, the social side of reading. If we really made a social side of reading and we allowed reading to be a collective thing the way we do movies and music and concerts and going out to dinner for that matter, we could really change not just their perception of reading and writing, but also their ability to do it because we would have found a couple of those issues early on. I can tell in annotating, socially or with sticky notes, I can tell who's not understanding the reading. Cause it's like, ooh, that's a little, I'm not sure, like, no, that's not the right person. Like let's go back and discuss this or someone else is like, I think you mean so and so. And it's like, wait, what? And now we have that conversation of time out. How many of you are confused about this and this? And the kids are like, those weren't the same people? Oh, and like that helps me to identify like this is, so it goes back to what are we dealing with that reading and how are we incorporating that conversation that social aspect in the reading as opposed to, oh, you're in 11th grade, you can read this. Being able to decode the words and being able to read it aren't necessarily the same thing. And that's essentially, it's kindergarten, but it could cover like my 11th graders need that same moment of let's talk about what you're reading and let's make sure we're on the same page. And maybe the conversation goes on a whole different topic, whole different, that's fine because it still ties in. And how often do we have a conversation? I'm like, I don't know how we got there. And you're like, but it connected and that's where we went and that's what sticks in our brains. Morgan, that's incredible. Well, speaking of things sticking in our brains, kind of collectively sharing things that stick in a kind of collectively shared wisdom really, we're coming up on the hour and I wanna certainly be respectful of everyone's time, especially Morgan, you know, yours right now, I think you're literally gonna be running back to your class and your students, Joe, I know has been triple duty, some childcare and some teaching and being here. And I wanna just thank the both of you as friends, as colleagues. Again, it's just been such a challenging year for so many. And I think what you shared with us today is not only your wisdom, but a very keen sense that educators are experts in so many things, not only certainly, you know, technical skills, how to use something perhaps like hypothesis. And as Joe was alluding to earlier, how to like maybe hack it or rearrange it or use it on iPads as Morgan you're doing or whatever the technical stuff may be. There's also, of course, a deep wisdom that you both bring regarding your discipline-specific literacy education commitments and the ways that, again, you've encouraged students as we've talked about to make meaning, to share their opinions and to think again with others. But again, even then beyond that, just how much you care for students and how affirming, you know, you've both, you know, shown your practice to be and allowing students to then elicit their identities and their wisdoms in the work that they do in school has just been really inspiring. And so I'm gonna be rewatching and listening to this actually to kind of continue to learn from the both of you. I know that many other educators will do the same as this has then shared within the broader liquid margins and social annotation community. So thanks to those who are able to join us again live. I know that again many will engage with this webinar after it's again posted publicly. We also look forward to having folks further continue these conversations later this summer during the I-Annotate conference. So again, Morgan, my sincere thanks, Joe, my sincere thanks to the both of you. And I'll just quickly kick things back over to Franny and Nate to wrap things up. Yeah, I also wanna thank you so much. And I second everything Raimi was saying, but in particular, I also sense this such caring about the students and how they're learning and also how they're being socialized as well because I think that, you know, that certainly asking a question, why do you hate this character? You know, and having and pushing that I think in particular can teach students about themselves their social lives. You know, why do you hate your neighbor? Well, figure it out, you know, like think about it and then maybe you won't, you know, so, or maybe you will, but you'll know why, you know, or whatever. So anyway, great conversation. Yeah, and I know you gotta go. And so I just wanna thank you and I wanna thank everyone who showed up and took part in this amazing discussion.