For several years, I’ve been driven by my indignation over one incident early in my teaching career. I was co-teaching a 7th-grade English class when my colleague told one of the students that the book he was reading was “above his level” and that he couldn’t read it during reading workshop time. I was puzzled.

When we met after class, my colleague explained to me that there was a “five-finger rule” in book selection. If there were five or more words on the first page that a student didn’t know, he couldn’t read the book because it was too hard.

My consternation turned to something closer to indignation. How was this 7th-grader going to improve if he read only books he could already read?

Since then, I’ve been working with struggling readers to use annotation as a method for reading difficult texts. I encourage students to slow down and annotate what they understand while reading. I require students to write summary annotations in the margins every time they complete a given section of a text.

The section might be a paragraph, a page or even just a line if a text is very complex. The key is that students recognize the difficulty of the text and adjust their annotations accordingly.

So, if a student is comfortable with the meaning of a text and needs to just focus on answering post-reading questions, she can annotate very lightly, perhaps jotting down short phrases for every paragraph or two. If a student finds a text challenging, she can summarize what she understands about every line. After writing several annotations, students look back over them and attempt to work out the meaning of the text using their own words and understandings.

I came up with this method after the thousandth instance of a student reading a passage and then saying, “I don’t understand any of that.” My stock response was always, “Of course, you do. Let’s look at it.” I responded in that way because students do understand things in even the most complicated texts. The problem is that we’ve taught students to focus on what they don’t know.

Having students read with the focus on what they understand makes it possible to read more complex texts for some meaning. This approach opens up the possibility for constructive rereadings that can help students fill in gaps.

This is what we all do as competent adult readers. I don’t always understand the finer points of the wonkish passages in economist Paul Krugman’s blog. But I read his blog and I understand the text for the most part, often learning how to read the more specialized language of economics in the process.

Almost nobody understands the finer points of the instructions on tax-return paperwork, but (unless we can afford to have somebody else file for us) we trudge through and make sense of it, accumulating knowledge and honing our ability to read these types of texts in the process.

So, when students start to read something difficult, ask them to take a few seconds periodically to think about what they have just read, write a sentence or two in their own words that hit the high points and then use these notes to make sense of the larger text.

The great part about this method is that in-class readings are easy to assess. A roving teacher can see the frequency of annotations, which suggest a student’s level of comfort with the text, and gauge the accuracy of the summaries. Using this method, a teacher doesn’t have to wait until a student completes a text to assess whether the student understands it.

As a summative assessment, the teacher can scan a student’s annotations throughout the entire text. During this assessment, it’s easy to quickly suggest ways that students could further their thinking. This can happen informally by pointing to a particular annotation and asking questions like, “What do you mean here?” or “Is this all that’s going on?” or “What part of the text showed you this?”

When necessary, you can point to an important section of text that was not annotated and dissect it with a few questions like, “What’s happening here?” or “Can you tell me about this sentence/paragraph/section?”

Generally, a student refrains from annotation because a particular section is confusing, so pursuing this line of questioning gives the teacher another chance to walk through the process of taking apart the text to get at what students do understand in it.