Teaching students to annotate texts across disciplines – PPP strategy

Teaching students to annotate texts

The PPP strategy – a multi-disciplinary strategy – reading across the curriculum

Students who read passively or superficially struggle with a lack of comprehension, poor retention of information and limited engagement.  Active readers who interact with texts gain a deeper understanding of the material and retain the information better.

Annotating texts purposefully builds better readers, and a systematic way of approaching this is the PPP strategy.  By using the same strategy with only minor variations each time, students become familiar and efficient with the method thus reducing their cognitive load.

It is definitely important to model how to annotate texts at the beginning of the year, as some students will claim to know how to annotate but they are actually just highlighting a few words or phrases in the texts without really understanding the text.  It works best if you do a think-aloud with students by annotating a text yourself in front of the class, so that your expectations are clear and students learn the process.  You will need to guide students through the process a number of times then gradually release them until they are independently using the strategy.

The PPP strategy can be used across subject areas and it works with both fiction and non-fiction texts.  It is also ideal for students who struggle to read, who are SLIFE or ESL, find engaging with texts difficult, and also for high achieving students.  There are two samples on the subsequent pages showing how the strategy can be modified for different subject areas.