Fix-It Strategies

Stuff breaks.

It’s an unfortunate part of life, but we have to deal with cars that won’t start, computers stuck on the Blue Screen of Death, ice makers that don’t make ice, and cell phones that won’t hold a charge.

Sometimes, when we read, comprehension breaks down, too. We encounter a paragraph with dozens of words we don’t know. A piece of text is too technical for our know-how. We find ourselves at the end of a page and have no idea what we just read.

For many of our students, this happens all the time. We give them texts, ask them to read them, and watch them run into roadblocks. Comprehension breaks down, and they don’t know how to fix it. What do we do in response? How do we help them? Sometimes, we ask them to underline, circle, or highlight unfamiliar vocabulary and other things they don’t understand. That’s a start, but it’s not enough.

Imagine you are having a really bad hair day. You look in the mirror and recoil in horror at what’s atop your head. Your hairstyle is a disaster, and you can’t leave the house looking like this. What do you do? Just point to the problem area? Circle what’s wrong? Merely identifying the problem isn’t going to fix your heinous hairdo.

You promptly take measures to alleviate the problem. Perhaps you apply a different product, take out the blow dryer or the curling iron, splash a little water on it, trim a bit with your shears, or—if none of that works—hop back in the shower and start all over.

You have go-to fix-it strategies when you find yourself having a hair crisis.

You also have fix-it strategies you use when you encounter difficult text.

When a word baffles you, you may look for context clues to determine the meaning, decide how crucial that word is to your overall understanding, look up a definition of the word if you need to, and reread the sentence, substituting that newfound definition for the word you didn’t know.

If you get to the end of sentence and go, “Huh?”, you may return to the start of the sentence and reread more carefully, put it into your own words, identify the most important elements, look at how the sentence relates to what comes before and after it, and read the words aloud in order to hear what it’s saying.    

         

At various times, you might jot notes in the margin, underline to emphasize the most important ideas, scribble a question beside a paragraph, sketch a visual or simple graphic organizer to help you make sense of some ideas, or talk with a friend about the text.

Your toolbox of fix-it strategies is a valuable resource for your students. Merely telling them to circle unfamiliar words or read a confusing passage again leads to frustration. “Look how many words I don’t know. Now what?” “I read it once and didn’t get it. How is reading it again going to help?”

We must talk with students about when to know whether a word is worth looking up and what to do after they look up a definition of an unfamiliar word. We must show them how to reread with a new intention to clear up confusion. We have to provide them with as many strategies as possible and help them to determine when each one is useful. Having strategic talks with students about reading builds stronger readers. Filling in the meaning for them doesn’t help them build skills of their own; they’ll be helpless when their comprehension breaks down without a teacher in sight.

Fix-it strategies aren’t confined to the literacy realm. We have math strategies, problem-solving strategies, critical thinking strategies, decision-making strategies, and study strategies—just to name a few—our students can benefit from.

Don’t leave your students stranded without a plan to fix their broken-down learning. Stuff breaks. Make sure your students understand that difficulty is a normal part of learning, but provide them with some tools to help them steer their way back onto the road to success.