Learning for Real: Teaching Content and Literacy Across the Curriculum

"In this book," writes Heidi Mills, "you'll learn how to plan for inquiry in a way that promotes literacy throughout the day and across the content areas." With Learning for Real, you'll find a rich array of resources for truly integrating a balanced literacy approach into every corner of the curriculum.

"We all know how exhilarating it is to learn something new," writes Heidi, "to develop expertise around a passion." She and her colleagues invite students into that experience, while developing five habits necessary for the content learning inside and outside of the classroom:

• carefully observing the world by using the tools and strategies of a discipline
• posing questions and investigating problems from numerous perspectives
• drawing information and evidence from primary and secondary sources, both nonfiction and narrative
• using the language of inquiry while reflecting on and sharing new learning effectively with others
• employing reflection and self-evaluation to grow and change.

To help you adapt instruction to your curricular and standards-based goals, Heidi includes planning guidelines, classroom-tested units of study, and from-the-field video clips of exemplar inquiry-driven teaching.

"Provide students with experiences that help them grow into strategic readers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, and social scientists," writes Heidi Mills. "Devote as much time to teaching children how to learn as what to learn." Link literacy and content with Learning for Real and discover that when students know how to learn, they exceed our expectations, and show what's possible in genuine inquiry-based classrooms.

Heidi Mills consults with elementary teachers and administrators across the country to help them create school-wide cultures of literacy and inquiry. As Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of South Carolina, Instructional Leader in the South Carolina Reading Initiative, as well as, Curriculum, Research and Development Specialist at the Center for Inquiry (CFI), Heidi has worked closely with a diverse range of school communities combining the best of literacy instruction with state-of-the-art work in the disciplines. Heidi's latest book, Learning for Real: Teaching Content and Literacy Across the Curriculum, offers rich descriptions of curricular structures, processes and strategies that nurture literacy and inquiry as well as classroom videos and rich examples of integrated units of study in the sciences and social sciences. As a consulting author, Heidi brings promising beliefs and practices to life and makes them accessible and transferable to varied school communities by sharing compelling classroom videos, student artifacts and integrated units of study. Most importantly, Heidi engages in collaborative inquiry with teachers and administrators to create truly responsive professional development grounded in the strengths, needs and interests of each faculty. Heidi and her husband, Timothy O'Keefe, a second and third grade teacher at CFI, were the recipients of the 2014 National Council of Teachers of English Outstanding Educator of the Year Award.