As I continue to tinker with the “cognitive disciplines” framework I’m using for my courses these days, I also tinker with what I might call the students’ performance spaces for these disciplines–that is, their opportunities to exercise and demonstrate these cognitive disciplines as part of their work in the class. For example, I’ve discovered that asking students to put a tagline in their blogsite names (blogs are for “zooming out”) seems to generate a small but noticeable increase in their engagement. That’s a qualitative judgment on my part, of course, but it reinforces my sense that naming opportunities–domains, stars, children, etc.–can be powerful occasions for personalization, expression, and emotional investment. Taglines are very piquant naming opportunities.

I’m tinkering with the annotation (“zooming in”) space as well, using Hypothes.is. Here my goal is not only to encourage close and careful reading, but to help shape an environment for consideration, for mulling things over, for thinking at a deeper and more reflective level than a kind of op-ed reaction (though that too has its uses, of course). It’s easy to get a reaction, but much harder to elicit a response. It’s harder still to encourage a spirit of still contemplation that doesn’t leap to judgment, even though judgment, in the end, can be not only warranted but essential. Before that judgment, however, a certain hospitality, a certain expansion of the bounds of consideration. A space for entertaining ideas.

So this time I’m asking students to tag their annotations with a word describing a specific quality of the passage they were annotating. I gave them a taxonomy of three possible tags:

• Interesting
• Puzzling
• Insightful

At first I merely stipulated that students should use a tag, remaining silent about the possibility of combining tags. Sure enough, without any direction from me, one student started to combine tags–a very thoughtful strategy, and one true to my own experience as a reader. Then, others did as well.

I adapted the tags from Dr. Paul Silvia‘s article “Knowledge Emotions: Feelings that Foster Learning, Exploring, and Reflecting.”  (Knowledge emotions? Yes.) Using appraisal theory, Silvia identifies four such emotions: Surprise, Confusion, Interest, and Awe. For my first trials, I used the word “puzzling” instead of “confusing” to stimulate some thought about the possibility of solutions or further inquiry, as the word “confusing” is often a stopping point for students instead of the starting point it should be. I omitted “surprising” because I wanted to keep the set of tags to three, at least for starters. I’ll add it soon. I omitted “awe,” not because I don’t believe in awe or experience it myself (quite the contrary), but because I didn’t want the term to be overused or to slip into “awesome.” Instead, I added the word “insightful” as a way to extend a part of the knowledge affect into a evaluative realm, and because I’m very interested in insight.

Some students forgot to tag their annotations, but most remembered. Hypothes.is makes it easy to sort by tags, so at a glance I could see which passages had struck students as interesting, puzzling, or insightful–or some combination. Obviously this gave me opportunities for follow-up in later classes as well.

As I say, early days. Still tinkering. But I thought the idea was worth sharing, and I hope folks will build on it and help me improve.