A few years ago, educational researchers David Pearson and Nell Duke asked the question, “What kind of thinking happens when proficient readers read?” This question led to ground breaking research results that have changed the way teachers teach children to read.

They discovered seven key strategies that good readers use during the reading process. Innovative teachers teach the strategies directly using metacognitive thinking (thinking out loud about your thinking) by modeling their own thinking out loud during the reading process. Students apply the new strategies by practicing their own thinking orally and in writing. Books like Mosaic of Thought by Zimmerman and Keene, Strategies that Work by Harvey and Goudvis, and Reading with Meaning by Miller explore these ideas in great depth and apply best teaching practices to teaching reading strategies.

Strategy One: Making Connections

Readers bring their own experiences and background knowledge to the text. They make personal connections, they connect one text with another, and make connections with the world. These connections enrich the text and helps the reader to understand the text at a higher level of meaning. Teachers teach these connections directly: text to self connections, text to text connections, and text to world connections.

Strategy Two: Visualizing or Envisioning

Readers see pictures in their minds when they read. The best part of reading is watching the “movie in your head.” Good readers experience seeing strong visual images. Children can be taught to visualize as they read. Often poor readers do not “see” when they read. We live in a visual world, yet it’s the visuals that many readers lack when they read.

Strategy Three: Questioning

Readers are constantly questioning, predicting, confirming their thinking, and adjusting their thinking. Good readers have a purpose for continuing to read. The purpose lies within their ability to question and predict throughout the reading of the text. The adjustments made helps readers to understand the text at a deeper level. Their basic and deeper comprehension soars when their minds are constantly making meaning through questioning.

Strategy Four: Inferring

Good readers read between the lines. The answers are not always black and white, and good readers are able to infer meaning based on background knowledge and text clues. When a reader is inferring they are thinking, predicting, adjusting, and confirming. This leads to deeper understanding of the text.

Strategy Five: Determining Importance

Good readers understand the main ideas of a text and can determine what is important. Readers are answering questions, determining key points, and stretching their thinking as they connect the important ideas with their own knowledge.

Strategy Six: Synthesizing

Good readers are able to synthesize their reading and produce their own ideas or products from their knowledge. Synthesizing is a higher order thinking skill that requires you to reach beyond basic knowledge and create new thinking.

Strategy Seven: Fix-Up Strategies

Good readers know how to tackle difficult text. If they run across a word they don’t know they chunk the word and use context clues to determine the meaning. If the just finished a paragraph and don’t have a clue as to what they just read, they reread the paragraph and focus on thinking about its’ meaning. They identify what they don’t understand and read back or ahead to try and clarify meaning. They look at pictures or other text features (like graphs or sidebars) to help them understand the concepts or ideas. Fix-up strategies can be directly taught to help students break down a piece of text and find its’ meaning.

These strategies are often taught separately, but they must be integrated and automated in the reader’s mind. Once students are aware of these strategies and learn to apply them during their own reading process they begin to become an automatic part of their thinking. The strategies help readers to understand text and gain meaning by applying their own background knowledge or schema, as well as understanding the author’s message.

By: Lisa Frase

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A clinical nurse is another term used for registered nurses who, as the term implies, work in actual clinic settings. Clinical nurses are also called nurse practitioners. Clinical nurse jobs are very flexible in nature. Clinical nurses can work in various types of clinics, and can enter various specializations, given the right qualifications.

The fact that clinical nurses span specific medical fields makes the number of clinical nurses quite huge. Most nurse practitioners fall under the clinical nurse category. Several subcategories also fall under it. The clinical nurses who achieve and complete the qualifications for specializations in specific areas are called clinical nurse specialists. These nurses can specialize in various fields of health and medicine such as midwifery, psychiatric or mental health, geriatrics, pediatrics, among many other fields. These nurses also claim specific titles such as mental nurse, maternity nurse, and theatre nurse. A clinical nurse can also specialize in the surgical section, or the emergency room and accidents section. Some clinical nurses can also be stationed in the Intensive Care Unit. Aside from these specializations, clinical nurses can also work as a general staff nurse or administrative nurse in hospitals and clinics.

This wide variety of options when it comes to specializations and areas makes clinical nurse jobs a very common type in the medical and health field. Aside from that, given the large number of hospitals and clinics, and each one needing several nurses for every particular section, clinical nurse jobs are quite in demand nowadays.

There are also several levels in the hierarchy of clinical nurses. There are simply clinical nurses, while there are also clinical support nurses. Then, as mentioned, there are clinical nurse specialists, who work in specific areas. There are also chances for career advancement in being a clinical nurse. You can move on to become a clinical nurse advisor, a clinical lead nurse, or a clinical nurse manager. This further increases the types of jobs available to those interested to pursue a career in the nursing field.

Clinical nurses have varied responsibilities. The mix of duties typically depends on the specialization or the area they work for. However, other factors can also affect the weight of responsibilities of a clinical nurse. Depending on the size of the organization, a clinical nurse can have more or less responsibilities than is normal. However, the responsibilities of clinical nurses mainly revolve around clinical practice, which summarizes the act of providing nursing care to patients. Although it is summarized in a single term, the word clinical practice deals with a lot of things and is the main focus of the nursing field. However, aside from clinical practice, they can also be faced with responsibilities to do conduct research, and to handle consultations and management responsibilities, among some others.

The clinical nursing field is up and running nowadays. The need for clinical nurses is constantly increasing, and nursing jobs are now speedily rising towards the top of the charts. More and more incoming college students are advised to consider a career in nursing. A lot of people veer away from clinical nurse jobs because they don’t think they have what it takes. They are quite mistaken. With the various options and specializations when it comes to being a clinical nurse, any skill can come into play. Those interested to pursue the nursing path can choose from amongst the rich number of options to find the one that best suits their preferred area, their knowledge, and skills.

By: Beverly Maniago

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