Learning activity

Exploring real-world teaching scenarios through social annotation

Use social annotation documents to help future classroom teachers engage with real teaching scenarios, discuss challenges, and reflect critically on effective teaching practices to support their own professional development.

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Created by:

Dr. Rachel Faerber-Ovaska

Youngstown State University

Pedagogy

Social learning theory

Learning outcome

Prep time

Intermediate (10-30 min)

Activity type

Learning Activity

Why this learning activity?

Learning activities targeting high-order skills like this one can help you activate students more effectively. This learning activity will help you with:

Identify and apply strategies

Students will examine real classroom scenarios, identify key challenges, and justify evidence-based responses using targeted annotations and questions.

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Engage in collaborative inquiry

Students will initiate and sustain discussion threads, respond constructively to peers using clear criteria, and co-build shared understanding of effective practice.

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Reflect and improve practice

Students will synthesize insights from annotations and peer feedback to articulate specific, actionable improvements to their future teaching.

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Activity setup

Activity steps Activity goals Tools used In this activity

Exploring real-world teaching scenarios through social annotation

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Activity steps

Read instructions: Students go through the instructions in order to understand the assignment requirements.
Annotate: Students will open the Interactive document and interact with instructor’s questions that were added. They are also required to create their own unique threads and interact with other peers threads.
Rate discussions: Students assign ratings to quality of discussion contributions of their peers using specific criteria. There are also recommended required contribution guidelines for students.
Receive reviews: Students receive and read feedback based on their discussion contributions.
Reflection: Students reflect on the outcomes of the activity and their learning and their received feedback.
Grading: Instructors assign grades based on the students feedback, participation and engagement.

Learning Activities Used

Interactive Document

Student-Content engagement to stimulate student success

In this activity

The Interactive Document scenario was generated by AI for demonstration purposes. An instructor could also find or write up an account of challenges faced by a real teacher in a real classroom.
There are several documents attached to the instructions that are helpful for understanding the assignment.
Student collaboration settings are “contribute individually, see contributions of everyone” to encourage interactions and group annotations.
There are several questions within the Interactive Document that help prompt the social annotation on relevant topics for students within teaching classes. These include critical thinking and scenario based questions.
Student discussion contribution rating has recommendations, it requires students to: set up at least 2 discussion threads, post 4 replies, and post a reply in all teacher discussion threads. You can adjust these to fit your needs.
There is a reflection step with guided instructions that is required for the completion of the activity.
Grading is turned on to ensure all students engage in the discussion, ensuring that opinions across the whole group are considered and heard.