Stratgies help provide students with specific tools and supports in order to engage and act with materials.

This an activity worth doing with you students! Take a survey; have them write down their methods on post-its and have them work as a class to group them.

You get some great ideas for workshops from here.

The act of actively engaging with a text can be mechanical (moving our writing utensils across a page), but these hands on 'simple tasks' help get us thinking more deeply about the specific elements of a text.

Finding ways that don't seem forced help demonstrate the relevancy of these skills. It's not just a 'reading skill' it's a life skill. Active engagement with any media is a 21st Century life skill.

Challenging our pre-conceived notions (model for students how we are constantly thinking, revising, questioning)

I've done this with my students too when I was modeling how to annotate poetry; thinking and indulging in those curiosities as you read, immediately as you experience them, then once you've 'experienced' the text, going back to think more critically about it (they whys and hows that shaped your connections and thoughts)

It's interesting to hear it phrased this way, considering that the traditional definition of text was associated with written words in books. Now, I feel that our understanding of what qualifies a 'text' encompasses more the concepts of creating a work that can be communicated between people (books, film, music, art, etc).

This really opens up choice for teachers and students in the classroom. Allowing students to engage with various texts in different media evaluates how they can isolate the aspects/elements they're thinking about in their work in a far more comprehensive way, synthesizing across multiple platforms, while reflecting on one topic. Evaluating themes and ideas from different perspectives with different contexts requires students to rely on their 'annotating' skills in order to take note of their impressions, reactions, thoughts, and opinions.

It's worth doing both! Annotate individually, interact with the text yourself, get down your ideas and thoughts, first impressions. Annotations are almost like participating in a conversation with the text. The text is written but now you get to respond and use it as a springboard to expand the conversation beyond the page (text to self and text to world).

Responding to others also furthers that dialogue, whether it be raising questions that act as fodder for your own thinking, or even clarifying bits of the text you may have found confusing. In one of my own classes, I've had to make annotations and then respond to others. That active conversation beyond the text also pushes us to think about how we can apply what we've learned beyond the text.

This is a great checklist to use. I would try asking a class to generate a checklist themselves and then compare to this one.