Reading & Literacy

Helping Individual Students Meet Literacy Standards

By Catherine A. Cardno — March 06, 2012 1 min read
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The 2012 Education Week Teacher PD Sourcebook has just been published and the articles are being rolled out online as we speak. One of the highlights (at least from my bookish point of view) includes an interview with Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, known affectionately as “The Sisters,” about a system they have developed to help teachers work through literacy standards while focusing on students’ individual needs.

Authors of two books, The Daily 5: Fostering Literacy Independence in the Elementary Grades (Stenhouse, 2006) and The CAFÉ Book: Engaging all Students in Daily Literacy Assessment and Instruction (Stenhouse, 2009), the pair has almost 60 years of teaching experience between them in grades K-6, special education, and reading resources.

Liana Heitin, the associate editor of Education Week Teacher and the Sourcebook, interviewed the pair about their system (dubbed the CAFE system) and why it works.

As Liana writes, Boushey and Moser have seen tremendous improvements in their students’ reading growth because of their model, which focuses on comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and expanded vocabulary skills. Over the course of an academic year, the pair has observed a range in the amount of growth experienced by students, starting with one year (which is to be expected within the span of an academic year) to those who made an astonishing leap of five years.

A version of this news article first appeared in the BookMarks blog.