Heinemann Blog

Today on the Heinemann Podcast, what role does developmental psychology play in teaching?

Struggle is how we learn. Rich tasks provoke productive struggle, during which students actively struggle through a problem as they work to make sense of it.

Understanding what the whole is, what the parts are, how they are related, and what might be missing in a particular problem are all critical aspects of numerical fluency.

Our aim should be to ensure that every minute is packed with thinking, reading, writing, lots of talk, and lots of books. To that end we need to reexamine the assumption that students can read only one book at a time.

The value of play comes from the fact that the child wants to play, and has to come up with the play him- or herself. Attempts to simply make a lesson playful miss the very psychological characteristic that renders play such a powerful means for learning during childhood. Play is the child’s work.

Before you get started on your journey of making books in writing workshop, there are a few things you need to know about the practice.

Today on the Heinemann Podcast, does the design of an assignment impact the quality of a student’s work? Jim Burke is the author of The Six Academic Writing Assignments: Designing the User’s Journey.

Math has moved on: now, instead of merely memorizing multiplication tables, students are expected to know what multiplication means and use more than one strategy to solve, then explain their thinking to peers and teachers. Let’s talk about why that is and how parents can help.

The PLC Series begins again for the 2018-19 school year!

Reading is a process that is internal, and where the problems lie can seem difficult to pinpoint. Happily, though, for many young readers, once they get focused help working through stuck points, their progress seems to skyrocket.

What happens if we under scaffold a child and he’s not successful? We work with the child to fix it. Everyone—every child in our readers’ workshop, every teacher, every adult, every human—fails and is disengaged at some point.

Understanding as you're reading helps you to engage with the text, read accurately, read with fluency, understand what the author is saying, and think beyond the text. In essence, comprehension is everything.

Turn & Talk is a celebration of Heinemann’s 40th anniversary, hosting conversations between authors who have written for Heinemann since its early years, and those who are newer authors, bringing their unique perspectives to the table.

Begin conferences by asking students an open-minded question that invites them to talk about what they're doing as writers.

Developing lifelong reading begins with books and we, as educators, have the power to make a school’s book supply seem endless in the eyes of its readers.

when a teaching community comes together in a shared study of a topic, they become a community of learners. They become more open to not having all of the answers, and to letting go of old ways of thinking.

Just as conferring is one part of the readers’ and writers’ workshop and could not be implemented in isolation, conferring in mathematics must take place on a broader instructional stage. But if tasks in the classroom don’t demand deep thinking, we’re left with thin conversations about answers.

If you’re an experienced workshop teacher, the book will help you imagine new possibilities for getting started. If you’ve ever longed for beginning writers to show more independence during units of study across the year, then this book is for you.