As a 7th/8th grade Humanities teacher, I wonder a lot about what happens for students when they read. At the beginning of the year, when I asked students to annotate an article, I would usually receive a page saturated with yellow highlighter and a few symbols like happy/sad faces or question marks. While students had in fact annotated, their annotations did not reveal much about their thinking while they read. I began to wonder if this practice was really increasing their comprehension. I wanted to know the intricacies of their reading process: What do they do when they get stuck while reading? How do they know something is important? How do they know when they do/do not understand? How do they read for an academic purpose? With the support of Mills Teacher Scholars and my teaching partner, Eva Oliver, I chose to focus my Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry on annotation because I hoped it would provide a peek into the minds of my students as active, thinking readers and thus help me better understand how to support them to access and analyze complex texts. A first step in my inquiry was getting clear about what successful annotation looked like. Using a model student’s work, Eva and I ultimately winnowed our indicators of success for annotation to: Student uses selective highlighting Student's annotation reveals sense-making/comprehension Students's annotation serves an academic purpose like answering a historical question What Do I Say to the Text? It Doesn’t Talk Back! When asked to “talk to the text” or write notes in the margins, most students repeatedly asked, “What do I say to the text?” While they had no trouble highlighting, they often struggled to write a meaningful “talk to the text” that was more than a symbol, an “OMG!”, or a one-word question. One student even cheekily quipped, “I tried talking to the text, but it doesn’t talk back!” However, I found that when I asked students, “Why did you highlight that?” they always had an answer. My response was always, “Write down what you just said! That’s your talk to the text!” Usually this was all the encouragement students needed to begin. Gradually I saw students independently produce more complex annotation. In the example below, Flor, a long-term English Language Learner and one of my focal students, quickly began to exceed the indicators of success. She selectively highlighted using her own color coding key and her talk to the text not only revealed that she understood the text, but also that she analyzed it using the lens of oppression.   While Flor was meeting my indicators for successful annotation, she still sometimes struggled to connect her annotations to comprehension/analysis questions. Thus, even though she understood the text, something got lost in the transfer of that understanding when she had to use the information to answer a question. For example, in response to a question that related to her excellent annotation, she produced the following:

Teacher Scholar Sharolander Ellis Doing inquiry work has been no easy task for me. I did not know what to expect or what my expectations were in working with Mills Teacher Scholars, and I didn’t exactly figure it out until close to the end of my second year of inquiry-based work. As an individual and teacher, I pride myself on being a lifelong learner, but I find this to be contradictory to the way teaching is structured today. Teachers are handed curricula, most of which are scripted so that we do not have to do much thinking. These guides typically include the material being taught, how to teach it, the activities, and so on, all determined by someone who doesn’t know my students at all. How could this approach be applicable or equitable for all? The thought of having something easier is appealing as we try to reach new and sometimes unrealistic expectations set by districts, but we lose sight of how this structure can work against us and our students. Each time my inquiry colleagues and I met with Mills Teacher Scholars we filled out a “Think Sheet” asking about our goals for our students, instructional changes we had made since the last meeting or were planning to make, and what we noticed was happening for individual learners. I didn’t always have substantial answers; I didn’t know or understand my true role in connecting my classroom work and Mills Teacher Scholars. I realized that I was so accustomed to being told the what’s and why’s of what we do that I didn’t have my own answers. I went through a period of frustration, vulnerability, and finally, of discovering my voice as an individual teacher.  My Inquiry Into Reader's Response The 2015-2016 school year was my second year working with Mills Teacher Scholars as a fifth-grade teacher at RISE Elementary in East Oakland. Both years I had a different inquiry focus due to changing from teaching math to English Language Arts. Since I was learning a new curriculum that year, I tried to use some of the strategies I had seen my grade-level partner use the year before, including incorporating routine opportunities for reader’s response (writing in response to reading a text). There was limited curricular support in this area at my site, so I used the same template format as my predecessor. I suppose I was taking the easy way out without much deep thinking around the process, but this is where we as new teachers in survival mode often end up. The goals of my inquiry focus seemed simple from the outset: students would write a three-paragraph reader’s response weekly that conveyed their ability to state their thinking and connect to the book through their writing. As I engaged in the inquiry process and pushed myself to think more deeply about my own expectations and my students’ learning, I realized that the reader’s response routine was more complex than I’d thought, which also proved to be true about the inquiry process itself. Expectations vs. Reality Our Reader's Response Template I gave each student a template to use in order to successfully write a reader’s response. Reader’s responses were expected to be three paragraphs long: the first paragraph introduced and summarized the book, the second paragraph included six to seven sentences that connected to a specific part of the story, and the third paragraph gave an opinion and a prediction about what would happen next. I can recall the very first reader’s response the class and I wrote together after I read aloud Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate. I demonstrated on the projector while students wrote in their notebooks. We discussed the book, summarized it, shared sentences that we felt connected to or that struck our curiosity, and then shared our opinions, which allowed students to write their own final paragraph. This seemed to go well and set the foundation for successful independent reader’s responses….or so I thought.

My experience reflecting with colleagues on video recordings of students' writing partnerships in our monthly Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry sessions has led me to some surprisingly simple discoveries that affect the way I teach writing over the long-term. Not only have I been able to use video to reflect on my own work, but I have been able to use the same clip as a teaching tool for my students.. The opportunity to collaboratively reflect on a short video of a writing partnership has dramatically pushed my practice forward. Writing partnerships provide students with time to express, develop and clarify thoughts about their writing with one another. Writing partnerships provide valuable time for students to express, develop, and clarify thoughts about their writing with one another. Allowing time for students to confer with each other throughout their writing process gives them space to construct their thoughts and even garner new ideas from their partners. Partnerships are a common component in our literacy curriculum, and the collaborative listening and speaking skills students develop in first grade partnerships provide groundwork for years to come. Last February, after having already established partner expectations with the class, demonstrating successful partnerships and carefully pairing students together, I set off to take a close look at writing partnerships in action. I hoped to find out what was actually happening during these peer conversations through gathering video data before my upcoming Mills Teacher Scholars inquiry session.

Currently a doctoral candidate at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, Suki Mozenter took part in the Alameda Unified ELD teacher scholars. Suki and her colleagues spent 2014-15 using inquiry to understand...