Topic: Video

Lester and Katie offer a framework that can both deepen and broaden students’ understandings, insights, and empathy for the greater human family.

To learn together, children need to figure out how to live in the confined space of a classroom, developing processes that enable them to navigate their environment, and each other, with care, respect and trust.

Think about aligning beliefs and practices not within the classroom, but in your personal life.

Talk has a purpose—and that purpose is to tackle the unknown—to strategize, to innovate, to problem-solve, to construct understanding. This use of talk “in the wild” frames the “why” behind purposeful talk in the classroom—our rationale for designing teaching and learning that’s dialogic in nature.

The Comprehension Toolkit series offers robust instruction to encourage students to develop the reading comprehension skills that lead to lifelong learning. See what's inside in this unboxing video!

When the reader stands in his or her own worldview, unable to see or conceive of any other perspective, a book can be a bridge. The right book, at the right time, can span the divide between where the reader stands in this moment and alternate views, new ideas, and options not yet considered.

The teaching of phonics is a means to an end. Children need to decode in order to independently read and write. Phonics shouldn’t feel like an interruption or detour away from these authentic experiences. Phonics should be the building of a curiosity.

We want to build a bridge for children—a bridge between what we are doing in class and the lives that they lead outside of class. We want to be able to show kids how each skill we teach in class makes life right now better outside of class.

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.

The classroom library is the home of a class’ reading community. Like any remodeling project, it is best to make a plan that is real but achievable for the situation at hand. We always advise not to take on more than you can finish in the amount of time you have to do it.

I still believe that conferring is where the magic happens—it’s the heartbeat of the literacy block. It’s an essential time for teachers to meet with students, tailor instruction to their individual goals, provide them with meaningful feedback, and grow relationships.

We already accept notetaking as a part of classroom life, so let’s welcome sketchnotes into the notetaking family! Notetaking as a practice stands the test of time, and for good reason. Research suggests that taking notes in real time and thinking about those notes later boosts student learning.

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.

The ability to listen will not make teaching easier. It will not take the painful parts away, but listening can give us our children back. If we listen to what children and communities are saying, and we respond accordingly, we can be ourselves again. We can be people.

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.

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.

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.