Determining Which Strategy to Assign

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One of my teaching partners came to me with an assessment she'd just given one of her students. A brand new teacher, she had done a fabulous job of administering the assessment. She could tell which CAFE area the student needed to work on, but didn't know how to decide which strategy to begin with.

When assessing a child, we keep a CAFE Menu near and ask ourselves two questions: Which CAFE categories are strengths for the student? Which are areas of greatest need? Once those are identified, there are a couple of different tools to help us make an instructional decision about which strategy to introduce first.

The first tool is called From Assessment to Conferring: Sample Needs and Strategies. This one-page guide is designed to support teachers by suggesting which strategy they might begin with, based on what they are seeing in a child's assessment.

The second tool is called The CAFE Menu 6-5-4-3. We are often asked if The CAFE Menu strategies should be taught in a sequential order. Since we teach based on student need, the answer to that will always be no. The numbers 6-5-4-3 refer to the strategies most commonly used by adult readers: The top six in Comprehension, five in Accuracy, four in Fluency, and three in Expanding Vocabulary. When assessing a student, if it isn't immediately obvious which of the strategies would be a logical choice, we look to those most often used. This is also a guide for which strategies we start teaching the whole group each year.

The bottom line is this: Teaching reading is a process of observing a child, really watching and listening to what they are doing as a reader, reflecting and thinking about what the next step may be for them to support their growth, and then jumping into the teaching of that strategy. The power of frequently conferring with students is that we can readily and in a timely manner switch if a strategy does not seem to be helping.

View Assessment to Conferring

View CAFE Menu 6-5-4-3

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