Teaching Unscripted

Readers look to books in to understand the world and the better to understand themselves. But too many students grow up in book deserts. In the same way as growing up in a food desert can determine what children will or won’t eat, limited access to contemporary titles often shapes how students think about reading for pleasure.

When you start thinking about how to use AI in your teaching life, don’t begin by asking what it can replace. Instead, ask how it can help make your work more sustainable and joyful. 

Join the free Heinemann Educator Summit, September 28–October 1, 2026, and be part of a community of educators committed to keeping teaching and learning deeply human in a digital world.

The case for taking a balanced and deliberate approach to technology use in the classroom. Screens should never take the place of high-quality teaching; they should enrich it, based on student need.

As students in grades 3-5 encounter more complex concepts, there can be a tendency for instruction to shift toward rules, procedures, and memorization. Yet, without context, mathematics can quickly lose its meaning. One of the most powerful, and often underutilized, ways to provide this context is through children’s literature.

Feeling stuck between mandates and meaningful teaching? Join Heinemann authors Ellin Oliver Keene, Cris Tovani, Debbie Miller, Anne Goudvis, and Steph Harvey for a multi-event webinar to explore how to bring comprehension, thinking, and engagement back to literacy instruction.

From inconsistent instruction to growing intervention or uneven results, these patterns could point to gaps in your core math program. See what effective math materials do differently.

Learn how to use habit stacking to get more reading in. Think about your routines and how you might pair one old habit with a new one. Strategies for teaching students how to also find time in their day to enjoy reading.

Students are much more likely to learn words when they see them in context as opposed to encountering them in isolation. Kelly Gallagher outlines five ways to build vocabulary beyond test-prep and vocabulary lists.

Explore how nonfiction decodables support phonics development, build background knowledge, and help beginning readers apply skills in meaningful contexts.

Approaching SEL through the MTSS framework starts with strong Tier 1 instruction, ensuring all students have consistent opportunities to learn, practice, and apply essential skills. Watch the video for activity suggestions for each tier and goal.

The ways that we teach whole-class novels are often ineffective and alienating. Kate Roberts outlines how time, teaching methods, transfer, and text complexity are barriers to effectively teaching whole-class novels.

How to become a teacher who understands how to use and help shape the curriculum, not just being handed one.

A Teacher's Guide to Using AI professional learning companion and book study guide offers a shared structure for educators to read, reflect, and talk together thoughtfully about how AI is showing up in schools and what thoughtful, human-centered responses can look like.

A list of 12 Heinemann professional books about the teaching profession, including personal reflection, literacy, and math.

Digital devices have changed the ways we read, which isn't always a bad thing (consider: Kindle and BookTok). While recent data suggests a decline in people who read, we believe that new technologies can, and should, facilitate reader engagement.

Learn how reading comprehension instruction supports meaning making, knowledge building, and academic success within a comprehensive approach to literacy.

Kids need to be explicitly taught how to comprehend multimodal texts, and how to create a mental model of the information or story, no matter the format presented.