Heinemann Blog

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.

I’ve been teaching and learning how to be a more effective teacher for most of my adult life. One thing I know for sure. Of all the factors that predict how well K-12 students do in learning to critically read, write and think, ongoing professional learning is the most vital. In fact, student learning and teacher expertise are inseparable.

To honor our commitment to protect our authors’ voices and expertise, we are therefore updating the copyright pages of our books and products to include the following:

When students write Reading Responses about a text, they have something to say in class. It may be a minor point, or it may be a major point, but it is a concrete thought and it is tied to a specific part of the text.

In this third Turn and Talk discussion, Ellin is joined by Linda Rief (The Quickwrite Handbook) and Sara Ahmed (Being the Change) as they share their stories of their teaching journeys, teacher autonomy, and student inquiry.