WNY Education Associates » 6+1 Traits of Writing

Honoring Editors of All Ability Levels

Angela — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:07:45 +0000

Conventions are best introduced as an area of focus after drafting and peer-review have taken place. Differentiating peer-editing processes enables teachers to ensure all writers that they are valued for what they CAN do, and writers of all ability levels CAN act as effective editors.

Identifying what kids can do and placing them in heterogenous editing groups is the first step. Determining each student’s editing strengths is a piece of cake. Using previous writing samples or surveying students provides good information about their capabilities. Some students may know how to find and correct more complex errors, while others may know that the first letter in each sentence must be capitalized and that paragraphing is necessary.

Once heterogenous groups are established, each editor can be assigned tasks that match his or her expertise. As writers meet in groups of 4 or 5, writers may pass their papers round-robin fashion around the group to receive targeted support from their peers that will improve their use of conventions. Conversations might also take place around word choice and sentence fluency at this time as well, although these traits should be introduced by teachers and considered by writers during the drafting phase of the writer’s process.

As you begin building your student’s understandings of conventions, you might find the resources provided by the Purdue University Online Writing Lab helpful. Teachers I know also enjoy sharing these videos with their students.

This post was the fifth in a series focusing on writing and the 6+1 Traits. You may find the others here:

What IS Good Writing?

Ideas Inspire Prewriting Inspires Ideas

Drafting: Giving Voice and Shape to Our Ideas

Introducing Young Writers to the Peer Review Process

Students Seeking Publication

Wordle and Word Choice

Angela — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:31:36 +0000

I spent yesterday with the high school English Department at Depew Union Free School District. These folks invited me in to help them approach formative assessment as a process that leads to instructional improvement rather than a product that leads to grades. They’ve begun exploring the 6+1 Traits of Writing, considering what their middle school colleagues have been up to, and looking to new tools for support.

Wordle was a big hit yesterday.

I introduced it as a tool that could be used to support the development of better Word Choice in writing, but there are probably a hundred different ways to maximize Wordle’s potential. For instance, this is what happens when I drop the New York State English Language Arts standards into Wordle. Doing so provides us a whole new way of talking and thinking about the document. Theresa Gray suggested using it to explore important historical speeches, and some of the teachers that I was working with yesterday uploaded the first chapter of Catcher in the Rye, eager to share the work with students in class and follow the conversations that would unfold from there.

Writers could use Wordle to check for redundancy in their pieces as well. My eleven year old daughter uploaded her blog, and within a matter of minutes, was able to identify the most frequently used word within it. Really. No. Really. The teachers that I worked with yesterday had other ideas as well. They plan to ask students to create Wordle white papers for their completed writing pieces, knowing they will serve as great introductions to their work. They also thought to use it as a way to identify high frequency vocabulary words and terms in different types of text.

How about you? How could you use Wordle? How do you?

The 6+1 Traits of Writing: Helpful Resources

Angela — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 15:56:11 +0000

Allowing assessment to become an informative piece of the instructional process can start with very small steps, and in my experience, starting small prevents overwhelm and allows the true meaning of the formative assessment process to be preserved a bit better over time. Many of the teachers that I work with rely upon the 6+1 Traits of Writing in their efforts to help students better understand what good writing looks like and how they might develop these criteria in their own pieces. What follows here is a quick set of resources for those who are new or even experienced users of the Traits. Thank you to my network on Twitter for pointing me to many of these. Please leave a comment below to share what you have found in your travels as well!

Getting Started: Understanding the 6+1 Traits of Writing

NWREL provides this description of the traits on their website.
Research regarding the model is available there as well.
Steve Peha of Teaching That Makes Sense shares a wealth of writing resources on the sidebar of his home page. This download, which focuses on writing assessment, supplements the work of the Traits very well.
Jeff Watson and Mary Peterson provide an introductory guide to using the Traits here.
Interested in receiving training for your own purposes or becoming a turn-key trainer? This page provides details that you might find helpful.

Scoring Guides and Rubrics

Official scoring guides, including the condensed rubrics, can be found here. This page also includes samples of scored student papers and practice opportunities for new users.
Kid-friendly rubrics and other resources have been shared here by the South Dakota Department of Education. Maryvale Elementary in Alabama provided their kid-friendly rubric to Middleweb.
A rubric to grade converter can be found at NWREL.

Sample Lesson Plans and Prompts

NWREL has compiled this extensive database of lesson plans that incorporate use of the Traits.
A set of writing prompts is provided here.
Northern Nevada teachers share 59 Traits-based lessons at Writing Fix, using mentor text to model use of the traits via picture books, chapter books, excerpts of literature, and poetry. Check out Rob Stone’s iPod inspired lessons here!

Locating Mentor Texts

A bibliography of resources aligned to the Traits is provided at Writing Fix.
The South Dakota Department of Education shares their lists here.
Picture Book of the Day is the blog of author and teacher Anastasia Suen.
Scholastic offers mentor text recommendations here.
Deb Renner Smith blogs about writing, reading, and mentor text at Writing and Reading Lessons.

Writing Process Support

Ruth Culham shares the 6+1 Traits of Revision at Scholastic.
Teaching That Makes Sense is the place to find all of Steve Peha’s fabulous writing downloads.

Web 2.0 is All About Writing

Visualizing how the writing process, the Traits, and web 2.0 tools work together at WiredInstructor.

Posters

For younger users: at OWL.
Check out Steve Peha’s Reading-Writing Poster Pack at Teaching that Makes Sense.

Other Valuable 6+1 Traits Resources To Support Your Continued Professional Development