When I tie my shoes, I no longer say to myself, “OK, first make a bunny ear….” I never once took a quiz on the steps of shoe tying in order to prove I understood the bunny strategy.

Literacy strategies should be just like that: Students are weaned off of them when they are no longer needed or when a particular strategy proves to be unnecessary, impractical, or ineffectual.

Teachers are always on the lookout for the newest strategy to fix student literacy issues. Websites like Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers are full of strategy examples (unfortunately, many pilfered from the work of others and recycled with a new graphics) to distill the process of comprehension and understanding into an acronym. We can teach students to UNRAAVEL, RAP, UNWRAP, SCRIP, GIST, SOAPSTONE, THIEVES, SWBS, KWL, or SQ3R their text. These strategy acronyms are printed on posters, charts, and packets of worksheets. The hope is that if students memorize and follow all the steps in the acronym, “deep comprehension” (feel free to substitute other phrases like “fabulous writing” or “high-level thinking” as needed) will result.

Consider lit circles. Although intended as a way to help students practice critical conversation about text through various lenses, lit circles can easily become packets of role sheets completed before a mechanical and disjointed conversation—a round robin exercise that is little more than having students read their role sheet aloud. The goal of academic conversation is lost because the completion of the role sheet is what students see as their focus.

Don’t misunderstand, I think strategies have value.

However, I worry that a hyper-focus on steps and acronyms distracts from the real purpose of teaching strategies, which is to give students a way to organize information in text and encourage deep thinking when necessary.

Role sheets, acronyms, and posters are tools, meant to be temporary. The goal is to teach students to understand when a strategy would be helpful and give them options when they need to use them—and when they don’t.

The bunny strategy for shoe tying might not work for everyone. My little brother learned it as “wrap it around the loop and push it through.” With my own kids, I found it easier to just buy them shoes with Velcro straps.

Just as every student doesn’t need a reading strategy in every instance. Voracious readers who love to share their ideas do not need to be reminded to stop and annotate every new plot point to prepare for a small group conversation. In fact, stopping the flow of the reading becomes frustrating and cumbersome, doing more harm than good.

Strategies and acronyms themselves can easily become the learning target instead of comprehension and understanding. Students are sometimes quizzed and tested on the acronyms, not the learning gained from the text. If you give a quiz or assignment to make sure students can label the parts of the strategy, you might be missing the point.

Let’s look at a couple of examples where the assignment focused more on the parts of the strategy than on the actual learning students should be doing:

Example 1: “Okay, students! For full credit, you need to find and annotate six examples of places where you visualized and four examples of places you made text-to-text connections. You also need to stop and make at least three predictions as you read your book independently.” What if these particular annotations don’t make sense with the students’ text? What if they get wrapped up in the reading and forget to stop?

Example 2: “Good morning, learners! We have been talking about context clues. In your packet you need to show you can label what you have learned. Does each passage selection contain a definition/explanation clue, a contrast/antonym clue, or an inference/general clue?” Should the point of the lesson be to identify the clue correctly or to determine the meaning of the word based on the clues given?

Strategies are meant to be temporary. They are meant to give students a way to organize their thinking, to support and nurture their success until the thinking process reaches automaticity. The goal is to teach students to understand when a strategy might increase their understanding and then allow them to use their chosen strategy flexibly, according to their task and need.

Here’s my advice for deciding when to use a strategy in class:

Be selective. Before you introduce a strategy, ask yourself the following questions: How many of your students need this type of strategy? Is it useful in other situations or disciplines? Is it for fiction or nonfiction? Is it too complicated or cumbersome?

Be flexible. Make sure students know that some strategies will be more helpful to them than others in certain texts. Remind them they can choose what makes sense for them.

Be careful. Strategies are intended as a means to an end. They are not the end.

Julie Scullen is a former member of the ILA Board of Directors and also served as president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council. She taught most of her career in secondary reading intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in literacy leadership and coaching, disciplinary literacy, critical literacy, and reading assessment and evaluation.