Conferring in the CAFÉ: One-to-One Reading Conferences in Two First Grade Classrooms

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive case study was to explore the teacher/student reading conferences in two first grade teachers’ classrooms in one primary school. Sixteen one-to-one reading conferences were recorded and transcribed over a two-month period and coded for content as related to the CAFÉ (Boushey & Moser, 2009) model of reading instruction, which the teachers used daily. We found that the two teachers placed heavy emphasis on students’ reading accuracy (the “A” in CAFÉ) and did not spend as much time working on comprehension, fluency, or expanding vocabulary (the C, F, and E in CAFÉ). We suggest teachers work toward balancing instruction in these areas during individual reading conferences with students and that they may benefit from recording and analyzing their conferences for teaching points and related prompts