The CAFE Book: Engaging All Students in Daily Literacy Assessment and Instruction

Teachers are learners too, and for the past ten years, Gail Boushey and Allison Behne work with hundreds of teachers and students nationwide, gaining insight into best practices for reading instruction. Using those insights, they developed The CAFE Book, Expanded Second Edition: Engaging All Students in Daily Literacy Assessment and Instruction to help teachers apply what their research has shown—that reading instruction is not about the setting, the basal, or the book level. Rather, effective reading instruction is based on what that student needs in that moment.

With the release of The CAFE Book in 2009, the CAFE system has been implemented in classrooms all over the world. It has changed the way teachers assess, teach, and track student information, and positively impacted the way students learn, practice, and talk about reading.

The CAFE Book, Expanded Second Edition builds on the same research-based, student-centered foundations, but now includes

• A new process of planning data-driven instruction using the Seven Steps from Assessment to Instruction;
• The Instruction Protocol – a framework to guide your instruction and planning;
• Significant resources to help with lesson planning, assessment, goal setting, and parent involvement;
• A revised CAFE menu and a checklist of skills for emerging readers;
• New and improved forms for both the online conferring notebook and a pencil/paper notebook to support more effective conferring with students;
• The addition of CAFE’s Essential Elements, a resource to guide your understanding of student-focused instruction;
• And new and revised Ready Reference Guides that include when to teach the strategy, options differentiating instruction, and partner strategies.

The CAFE Book, Expanded Second Edition gives you a variety of tools to structure your literacy block and create an environment where your students are engaged readers and writers with resources that set them up for success. This CAFE system is all you need to support, guide, and coach your students toward the strategies that will move them forward.