I knew I had work to do within my classroom library to ensure black boys saw themselves not just in their race and gender in books but in their intersecting identities, meaning books that represented their race, gender, interests, and/or experiences. (continue reading)
Over the years, the “library” space came to be used for professional development, math labs, anything but literacy programming, and collection development slowed down significantly. (continue reading)
Today on the Heinemann Podcast, author and editor Katie Wood Ray interviews Carl Anderson and Jenifer Serravallo, who both recently published two conferring books in Heinemann’s Classroom Essentials Series. (continue reading)
Heinemann fellow Julie Kwon Jee has this question: In what ways does a continuous exploration of identity via literature and personal reflection increase engagement and encourage students to become active participants in choosing the books they read both inside and outside their classrooms? (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
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. (continue reading)
