6+1 Traits

When I started to read the 6+1 Traits, the first thing I thought about was Fu and how this could help ELL students and even students on an IEP. The traits break down the seven most important things that make up a strong work of writing. I can see teachers using this in the classroom to help teach how to edit work and how to improve writing skills.

When I read this, I imagined a class where students are given time to peer edit, but go through each of these steps. Students look at the work and then ask “What is the main idea” before looking at the structure and organization of the work as stated by 6+1 Traits. The students start small and go step by step through the process rather than just look at spelling and grammar. The traits seem to pinpoint the small details that can be overlooked when peer editing. Voice, for example, is something I was not taught to directly look for when editing a paper. I would not think analyze this, and in turn, I wouldn’t be helping my peer as much as I could have. The same goes for sentence fluency and presentation.

The only traits I remember working on in school and paying close attention to was word choice and conventions. I remember we would always try to help each other with spelling and grammar when correcting a paper, but we als would look at if the sentences were worded well. Did the writer use “very” too often within the text? Is there another word they could have used for “good”?

In a classroom I could see this done as a “checklist” activity where students go through each trait and edit the paper according to what the 6+1 Traits say make a strong paper. Students will first focus on the main idea and then the organization. The activity may take a day or two, but they are focusing on making the paper as strong as possible. This also would make the students slow down their editing process.

I can’t wait to try our lesson in class for co-teaching. Frankie and I have great ideas and I’d love to see how this could work in a class setting

ELL in the Classroom

The reading this week evoked many ideas in me that I’ve had for a while. The school I worked at for four years had a heavy population of ELL students who speak Spanish or Portuguese.

Fu made many great points that hit home with me after working in a school with many ELL students. There does seem to be this expectation that students will enter schools and only be writing in English even if it isn’t their first language. At one point Fu mentioned a gentleman saying to her that he was told “… one should only think in English when writing in English.” This made my heart break because it seems to devalue the original language of a person. When a student comes into a school, of course they will want to write in their original language to express their ideas. I found Fu’s stages of writing very interesting in how she things it is great or students to slowly start writing in their language and then merge English into their writing as they learn.

I like that she also pointed out the horrible idea that it is frowned upon to write something in one language at first then translate it later. In Spanish class, that is how I learned to write. I’m not fluent in Spanish, but that helped me to learn the language faster rather than being forced to only write in a language I didn’t know. This is where the gentleman said that he was told to write in one language only. How is that possible when you aren’t familiar with it?

This also links later to a section in Pahl and Rowsell’s article where they mention literacy and power. In this section they mention that there are students that are not as literarily advanced as other students. I couldn’t help but feel that the ELL students are a large percentage of these students. They say they looked at the relation to literacy in “ethnographies of neighborhoods” and this felt like the polite way of saying they looked at the different cultures and ethnicities in the area of schools. In this case I would be willing to guess that there are many in those areas that may be ELL students and therefore lack power in literacy.

In their passage, Pahl and Rowsell said something that caught my attention. “The word literacies signals that literacy is multiple, diverse, and multilingual and spans the domains of practice, from home to school to community, and in each domain there are different literacies.” This idea seems to be forgotten at times. Literacy is made up of so many parts, including other languages. English was not always around; it was made from different languages put together slowly over time. So many of our words come from Latin roots, yet we still refuse to let people speak their language that may have influenced out own language.

Quick Write: Question 1

When I was in school, I started to learn the five paragraphs structure starting in middle school. The structure was drilled into our heads and even in high school we were forced to follow it. In high school some papers may have become six or seven paragraph essays, bit if we added more we were expected to stay on topic. As I got higher in grade we did begin to learn more about adding paragraphs beyond the typical five, but even then, it didn't help much to prepare for college.

When I started my first college classes and had to write essays, I was very overwhelmed. I would try to get all my ideas in as few paragraphs as possible and all my essays were terrible at first. I felt like I had to learn a new way of writing all together. When I started at RIC I started to map out my essays. By map out I mean a bullet list of all the paragraphs and what they would be about. My first bullet would say introduction of course, then I'd quickly write a one sentence summary. All the rest would be body paragraph numbers followed by what the paragraph would be about. This helped me a lot to organize my thoughts and stay on topic.

I have shown this method to students I've tutored for the past few years and they said it helped them a lot. One student, who is now in college, said it "saved" her when her essays were assigned because she knew how to approach them. Her classmate who graduated from high school with her still struggled.

I agree that the five paragraph structure is a form of training wheels for students, but when do we start to take the training wheels off and teach more advanced writing? I don't recall ever being taught how to go beyond five paragraphs in a productive way.

Be Gone Five-Paragraph Structure

When I was reading Gallagher, one phrase that stood out to me was that he feels we should “…spend less time teaching writing and spend more time teaching the writer.” I love this idea because it seems like a form of backwards teaching that can change the classroom. He also mentions being more experimental with teaching writing and that we should get students to “mess around” and “play with” their writing when we can. When I was in school I was always taught one way of writing, intro paragraph, three or more body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This is also what Kenney spoke about when Erica was struggling with her paper. When we were taught how to write poetry, we were taught to follow a certain structure and we were graded on how well we followed those standards.

Reading that sentence again I noticed that I was always taught “how to write” in school rather than being taught to be a writer. It wasn’t until I studied writing in London with Teen Ink that I learned to think outside the box with when I wrote. All through time writers had to experiment and “mess around” with how they wrote in order to become great writers.

During my four years working as a substitute teacher, I had to be one of those teachers who followed a lesson plan that taught the five-paragraph essay format that Kenney talked about. As I began correcting papers in my long term positions, I felt like I was reading works from robotic students. Every introduction read the same way, every body paragraph was structured too perfectly with five to six sentences, and a conclusion that mimicked the introduction and restated the main idea. In a way it was almost scary because I couldn’t tell one student’s work from another. There was no individuality in their work.

I love the PEAS idea in the classroom as a new approach to teaching writing. There are fewer limitations and allows students to have more freedom in how they approach their writing. There are no paragraph requirements to restrict the students to five paragraphs, but still sets up the idea that they should make their point, give evidence, analyze their idea, and state why the idea is important. This can be achieved in so many ways without following the five-paragraph structure.

I enjoyed the readings and think they make some amazing points about writing. I’ve always wondered about this idea and questioned why we are so restrictive on teaching writing. I love that Gallagher and Kenney promote more freedom in writing for students.