Speaking Topics
- Teaching content and literacy through inquiry
- Problem and project-based inquiries
- Kidwatching and responsive teaching
- Teaching the skillfulness of inquiry through integrated units of study
- Talk matters: From careful conferring to rich and engaging whole-class conversations
- Creating caring and productive classroom communities and school cultures
- Getting started: Teaching children how to inquire as readers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, and social scientists
- Teaching for democracy and social justice
- Planning for inquiry across the curriculum using a workshop model
- Inquiry for ongoing professional development and school renewal
Speaker Profile
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.
Grades: K–5
