Teaching Unscripted

When you confer, you tailor your instruction to each student’s strengths and needs. But you do so much more than that. Conferring is where the magic happens. It’s the heartbeat of the literacy block.

Conferring is built on learning what students are doing and how they are thinking. In the first stage of a math conference, the teachers looks, listens, and asks with the goal of building an interpretation of student thinking.

This week on the Heinemann Podcast we’re learning about the importance of personal identity work in education. To understand this work better, and its impact on teachers, we’re handing this week’s podcast over to Heinemann Fellow, Minjung Pai.

In reading and writing workshop, strategic partnerships can help us provide an audience, built-in feedback provider, and peer-reviewer for every student. While we can’t clone ourselves and have a teacher next to every student, we can set up partnerships that support, motivate, and inspire.

The Reading Strategies Book and the Writing Strategies Book now come with free online indexes to help you quickly locate strategies to use in your classroom!

The overall design of an academic assignment, from the layout to the words used, is critical to not only how well a student preforms, but how they continue to learn throughout their academic journey. By taking a user approach, Jim Burke suggests that we can design better work for our students.

There are so many instructional opportunities when conferring with students: we can nudge readers and writers to clarify thinking, address a need through teaching points, model for students what it looks like to use literacy to make sense of the world — and so much more.

Getting Started with Beginning Writers is not a script you can follow, of course. But regardless of the children sitting in front of you, and regardless of whether it's the beginning of the year or sometime later, there are very specific big ideas and beliefs that can guide your practice.

“We learn lots from hero stories, but sometimes they leave out the concrete realities of change,” writes author Cornelius Minor. He goes on to write: “The ‘teacher as superhero’ story can be similarly misleading.” Today on the Heinemann Podcast, we’re exploring the reality of that story.

While good readers are able to meet state reading standards and often achieve at the highest levels on standardized tests, they can be helped to become more thoughtful readers.

Sketchnoting fosters metacognition. It's a vehicle to help us think about our thinking. The pens, paper, and apps we use aren't the end all, be all; they change with us over time as our thinking grows and changes. The stuff of sketchnoting contributes to the process. The media helps move the message.

If we want to ensure that kids benefit from the way that we choose to do school, we must realize that culture is not naturally occurring. Culture is visible and large and if we are not careful, our classroom and school culture can work to silence, exclude, and oppress children.

This week on the Heinemann podcast, a conversation with author Lucy Calkins on leadership. In Leading Well: Building Schoolwide Excellence in Reading and Writing, Lucy Calkins draws on the transformative work that she and her colleagues at the TCRWP have done.

How does a conference work? What do teachers think about? What do they say? A conference is not simply a venue for students to report on their thinking. A conference is a shared opportunity for teachers and students to learn together in the moment.

At this time of year, it’s natural to experience a flagging of energy - both yours and your students’. Attention is divided between school and all of the holiday goings on, and there’s a sense that everyone could really use the December break.

There is a better way than teaching to district assessments and high-stakes college entrance exams. Though we may have to teach a type of formulaic writing, we don’t have to abandon the work that truly matters to our students.

We are happy to share that on Monday, December 10, Heinemann author Marilyn Pryle was named Pennsylvania's Teacher of the Year in recognition of her innovative teaching and dedication to her students.

To assess for independence, probably the most important assessment is observational: what do you notice when you sit back and simply watch. You might come up with a checklist to guide your observations, something that would work across subjects areas.