Topic: The Classroom Essentials Series

What can we learn from the texts that we admire the most? How can they inform our own writing?

The goal is to teach students one thing in a very short amount of time. Why? A blog from the authors of A Teacher's Guide to Writing Workshop Minilessons, Lisa Eickholdt and Patricia Vitale-Reilly.

A fresh look at foundational, student-centered practices for pre-service and veteran teachers.

When conferring, align your teaching with crucial research on what works. It will give your students the boost they need to move forward throughout the year.

Mentor texts from a variety of high-interest sources along with diverse authors can be a real game changer in secondary writing classrooms. 

Young children love to learn and use new words. How do we tap into this natural curiosity and excitement to support vocabulary development?

As we think about supporting vocabulary during remote teaching, it’s helpful to start with some big ideas about how people learn new vocabulary.

How can we create daily structures and routines that support writers?

The same in-process response that professional writers receive is even more crucial for children. Learn how to teach children to use the language of writers to graciously give and receive feedback.

When students have lots of choices about what they will write about and how they will write it, there are many benefits.

This week on the Heinemann Podcast, Katherine Bomer speaks about her development as a writer and educator.

Katie Wood Ray interviews Carl Anderson and Jenifer Serravallo, who both recently published two conferring books in Heinemann’s Classroom Essentials Series.

An Assessment Conference offers you a little time to study a reader along a number of different dimensions, considering a variety of possible goals.

In the online resources for A Teacher's Guide to Reading Conferences, you will find a variety of note-taking forms and other documents that will help you get started implementing—or refining—reading conferences right away in your classroom.

Today on the Heinemann podcast Jennifer Serravallo introduces A Teacher’s Guide to Reading Conferences, which is part of Heinemann’s Classroom Essentials series. Jen says that while conferring with readers might seem intimidating or out of reach, it is attainable -and necessary- in every classroom.

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.

Feedback is key to student learning. Since writing conferences are conversations between students and teachers, they provide opportunities for two types of feedback: student to teacher, and teacher to student.

Learning never occurs in a straight line. Lisa Cleaveland and Katie Wood Ray, co-authors of Getting Started with Beginning Writers, know that this is especially true when it comes to learning to write.