In Writer, everything is a matter of style. A style is defined as a named set of “typographic attributes” such as font face or weight, indents (= paragraph margins), spacing above and below, “flow attributes” like page/column/section break before or after and “structure attributes” such as body text/outline, numbering.
Styles may be define for a full paragraph and will apply as a whole or for short sequences (aka. character style) overriding the underlying paragraph appearance. There are also styles for pages, frames and numbering counters (aka. list styles).
The name of a style should describe its semantics, not its appearance. E.g., Body Text is intended for the discourse while Heading 1 marks a paragraph as a first level heading (colloquially q chapter title). Think of the style names as markup tags structuring your document.
Many features of Writer rely on proper use of a small number of built-in styles.
This is the case of the chapter numbering and TOC construction. Titles of chapter should be written in Heading 1 style. You give a paragraph this style by selecting it from the drop-down menu in the toolbar. When you hit the Return key at the end of your chapter title, style automatically switch to Body Text for the chapter contents. You must reselect Heading 1 when you start a new chapter. The same goes with sub-titles as Heading 2-9.
Out if the box, Heading n are not auto-numbering. This must be enabled through a little procedure I won’t describe for the time being.
If you have “Chapter 1” repeated on every page of your document, then you probably didn’t type it in the correct page location. A page style defines several dedicated areas within a page: header, main contents, footer. Header and footer areas are unique for a single style and whatever you write in them is repeated unchanged on every page. To see the limits, check both View>Text Bondaries and View>Formatting Marks.
Another cause of repetition may be the incorrect choice of field variable in the header. The most recent Heading 1 title can be echoed in the header through Insert>Field>More Fields. If you try Cross-references, Headings type, you will select a given heading which will be statically copied into the header. To get a dynamic effect, you must use Document, Chapter type and select a format like Chapter number and name.
If none of these explanations fix your problem, attach a reduced version of your document to your question (use edit, not an answer which is reserved for solutions).
Also, beware of header and heading. Both words are close to each other but cover different things. Header is a style intended for text repeated on every page in the header area. Heading n are styles used to collect structuring headings and later build a TOC from this information. “Headings” are titles interspersed inside your document to describe synthetically what follows.
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