 Good afternoon, and welcome to this Wednesday after the webinar. I'm very glad to be a part of this webinar with me. I'm Deb Rogge, and I am a staff developer here at ESU8. This presentation is the first of four basic modules or sessions that on becoming rockers. These sessions are appropriate for all teachers of writing, no matter their experience in teaching, guiding, and or scoring writing, and are really geared for even the pre-K teacher all the way through to the 12th grade writing teacher. The overall purpose of this series is to provide teacher support and insight as they gather and guide all levels of writers from the very emergent writer all the way up to the experienced writer. This is the agenda for today's session. As you can see, we'll be talking about the sixth trait model. I'll be giving you both definitions of the model, and we'll be talking about what qualities teachers look for in writing, and those will be identified by each of the traits also. Vicki Spend is one of the early pioneers of sixth trait writing. She and a group of her fellow teachers sat down together and decided that they needed to have a consistency within their school system when they talked about writing or the vocabulary of it, the description of it, and all those kinds of things. And she simply says this quote is so pertinent. It says, to be an effective teacher of writing, we must first teach ourselves what good writing is, and then we're better equipped to teach our students. She goes on to tell us that there are 10 reasons to make sixth trait writing part of your instruction. I present these to you at this part of our presentation today just as a brief overview, because I'll be taking some time a little bit later in going through each one of them and giving you a little more depth and breadth on each of them. First of all, I think one of the things we need to do is to define what sixth is sixth trait writing. The first thing is that sixth traits is a shared vocabulary for teachers and for students. We all know that the current educational research shares with us the importance of identifying and instructing vocabulary. Now, sixth traits is actually a descriptor and a language that we use both as teachers and writers in regard to writing. They identify and they also define the qualities of what writing is. Then it's also a method of scoring and examining writing consistently. Six traits uses rubrics to identify the qualities of writing and the levels of their performance. Now, for each quality, levels of performance are identified within those levels of performance. There are indicators of performance qualities. Now, in the case of Nebraska, we have our four levels of performance, a one, a two, a three, and a four. And then we have our six traits, which are each identified, each one. And within each of the levels of performance, we have indicators. Now, these indicators assist teachers and students in identifying the strengths and the weaknesses of the piece of writing. It's also a tool for writing and using the writing process. Though it may not be identifiable immediately, the writing process is alive and well in each of the six traits. I'm going to take some specific time in section two to define and enhance the writing process as it manifests itself within the six traits of writing. So hold on for session two for that. Six traits is also a feedback system to our students. It's a tool for our teachers. Now, it provides a teacher a language. Now, remember, we talked about vocabulary. And vocabulary is a very important part of our language. So it's a language that's unique to writing. In addition, students are able to use and interpret that feedback because we've actually taught that language for writing and the vocabulary that goes with it, as well as it provides feedback to their and others' writings when the rubric is taught and it's exemplified. Session three, or part three, is going to. We're going to talk about some student samples at that particular time. And I'll be visiting with you about what qualities we see using your rubric in order to be able to identify and the indicators of that rubric to identify the strengths and the weaknesses of that particular piece of writing. Also, six traits writing is a tool to guide instruction in classroom. It offers T road map for writing instruction. The road map offers definition of strengths and weaknesses. You notice that it's about the fourth time I've used that particular phrase, strengths and weaknesses, in writing. These strengths and weaknesses are supported by trait, definition, and indicator. So that's what six trait writing actually is, is a definition. Six trait allows teachers to use rubrics. Rubrics are scales or scoring guides which identify the strengths and the weaknesses in a student's or others' writings. It provides also a definition of the traits. It indicates where the trait is strongest and where the trait might be weakest in what you might actually identify within each of those levels of performance. It offers also, if you look, if level one is the weakest level of performance and level four is the strongest level of performance, if you look at the level four performance and its indicators, it actually goes ahead and offers you a definition of what you would actually see in a high quality, in a high quality writing. I hesitate there because I was reading right now. Yes, we will have copies of the PowerPoints and the sheets that we used. You'll have those available to you. I'm going to show you where you can go to find those a little bit later in the presentation. That was a great question. Now, six traits also allows teachers to use samples of student writing. Now, one of the sessions that I'm going to work with particularly, we're going to look at nothing but samples of student writing. And those samples will be available to you. And I will give you some guidance as to what are the strengths and the weaknesses of those particular pieces, too. Because if you use student writing to teach an example like what writing looks like from a student perspective, it gives them examples and non-examples of strong and weak writing. It helps students discuss specific features of their writing also. They use that common language of six traits, that vocabulary that you taught them, and those exemplars that you shared with them and showed with them. It's a language that is very unique to writing, that of six traits. Six traits also allows teachers to improve writing through the qualities of good writing. That statement in itself speaks to itself. We'll be talking later in this presentation about what qualities teachers actually look for in good writing. And we'll be talking about them trait by trait. If we can share examples and non-examples of exemplars of student work with these qualities in them, we can help students better find minds what direction strengthening they need in their writing. Also, six traits allows you to incorporate a variety of lessons or activities. Each trait has some strategies specific to those traits which allow writers to find success within their writing. And then there are some strategies that I'll share with you. And in fact, this happens to be what session four is gonna focus on, are what are the various lessons and activities that you can use with your students in order to strengthen your students' writing. There are five levels of implementation that teachers profess having as far as their understanding and their depth of the six traits. The lowest level is called the pre-trade level. The teacher might feel that writing is too subjective and believe that you can't define it with any specific criteria. They really never got the hang of the writing process themselves and don't look at themselves as being writers. The trend seems to be that they'll spend 45 minutes or less a week on any kind of a writing activity, let alone a direct instruction in the areas of writing. Next, we have a trait dabbler. Now, a trait dabbler can name the traits, but they're really not sure how to define them or what they might be looking for in a piece of writing. Now, they have some knowledge about six traits, but they feel that the rubric is too long and too complicated and they become very confused by the rubric and when they have to make a decision, level of performance might be at, they find that it's very difficult to come to a personal consensus as to how that student might score. They tend to share with other teachers that their kids know what to do when it's asked of them. They'll do exactly what they want to, but they won't do any more than that and then some of those students that they have don't even do that. Typically, a teacher at this level of implementation might spend no more than 45 to 75 minutes a week on writing. Then we have the trait trainee. This person is ready to score some papers for my own class and see if someone else agrees. They're trying to assess using each of the traits, but they're still finding themselves thinking about the paper as a whole rather than actually going into an analytical scoring framework. Analytical scoring means that you're going to look at each of the traits or the groups of the traits and try to identify or isolate specific strengths and weaknesses of those traits. Now, this teacher typically spends about 75 to 100 minutes on writing, but they have the, they'll share with you that their students are writing more, but many still want me to tell them what to say on the writing or how much is enough or did I say enough here and you find yourself as a trait trainee still being the primary editor of your students' work. Now, if we look at a trait trooper, they're regularly using the rubric to score student papers and they can find themselves able to separate out the traits in their mind and as they read through a student's piece. She or he might also make sure that their students have their own rubrics and they do some practicing and some self-evaluation, but they rely still upon their teacher as the fact that the score that the teacher gives them is the right score. They spend a lot more time on writing. They might spend maybe as much as 100 to 120 minutes and understand that this is not in just in direct instruction of writing, but they offer very opportunities across the curriculum and in various content areas for their students to be able to write. They're starting to use pre and post assessments as to and setting writing goals for their students and they might have a reading, writing workshop for their students to be able to participate in. The last level is called a trait master and this person says that they can't remember a time before they started using the traits. The traits are so much a part of their world in writing and speaking and working with their students. The students disagree with the teacher's score. They can explain their thinking by using the rubric. So both the teacher and the student are well skilled in rubric ease and in that classroom, they write about everything all the time at the drop of a hat. Many times we find that other teachers are coming to them for support and assistance with the traits and in strategies and tips on teaching writing within their classrooms. In your classroom as a trait master, students have learned that writing is a way to think aloud on paper. So where are you on this continuum? Are you a pre trait, trait dabbler, trait trainee, trait trooper or a trait master? Let's go back to those 10 reasons to make six trait writing part of your instruction. The first one says that it provides a language for talking about writing. Good writing from classroom to classroom from teacher to teacher can have a different meaning within even one school building. The students might be in one classroom and the teacher says, well, just write whatever you wanna write about and they might be in another classroom and the teacher says it has to be so many words and in another classroom, it has to be so many sentences or paragraphs. It just makes it real difficult for the students to actually identify what the target is for writing until they actually have that experience with that current classroom teacher that they have. If we would use a definition and examples and non-examples of good writing, we become more successful at writing because our teachers share a common vision of good writing. In other words, all the teachers within that particular system have a common understanding and a common method of looking at student writing while their methods of teaching writing might be a little bit different. You need to, another reason is to keep your assessment consistent and honest. Have you ever come to the bottom of a thick stack of papers and thought, you know, I really should start over. I would have assessed those early papers so differently. That's where rubrics come into play and they give us a strong reference point. Actually, it's a safe harbor to which we can return. If we use the indicators of the rubric in order to identify strengths and weaknesses in the student's paper and we use that consistently and honestly, every student's paper that we read has a consistent scoring, consistent feedback, feedback that actually is purposeful and meaningful for that student. We need to make sure that writing and revising is manageable. We all know that writing can be overwhelming. Because of the six traits that define writing, it allows us to teach and assist our students how to write. Perhaps one day, you teach a lesson on leads, on another day, you show students how to come up with a good title or transitional words. Maybe you wanna talk to them about phrasing correctly. Step by step, you create writers who are confident in what they do if you keep writing and revising manageable. In other words, make sure you identify what you're going to work on in a piece. Don't try to do everything within a piece. It becomes just too overwhelming. It supports and strengthens the writing process. Remember in an earlier slide, we talked about the fact that six-trade writing is the vocabulary of writing. The words and the phrases that you use as a teacher to guide students through the writing process are also a part of six-trade writing. The language of six-trade only enhances a process-based approach to writing instruction. It doesn't replace it. You still have to have a process. It doesn't make any... If you're using the traditional writing process, perhaps you're using step up to writing for your writing process. Maybe you're using right traits, but the language and the vocabulary of six-trade only strengthens what you're doing with that. It only enriches what the understanding of how writing actually works. Guides purposefully for editing and revising. Purposeful editing and revising, excuse me. Rubrics reveal revision and editing possibilities. A good writing rubric allows you to look at a piece of writing one way and also to look at that piece of writing in another way. A good rubric becomes a guide to revision and we'll be talking about that in one of our next sessions also. Make students partners in the assessment process as it reason number six suggests. Why they become much less dependent on us, their teachers of writing, to give them that specific blueprint of that assessment or what they think we want them to write about. Writing is a problem solving activity. If you really think about that, it's a problem solving activity. So we need to get our students to identify to us exactly from that very beginning of the story how they're going to manage solving the problem and then wind it up all together and with a great strong closing to their writing. When we consider the reason we want to encourage that motivation while we want to promote those thinking skills. Students become a part of a community when they write in which their opinions about the quality of writing are frequently and actively sought. In other words, if we take examples and non-examples of student writing and we actually ask the students to give us some feedback on what their observations are about those pieces, we are causing them to think at higher levels. We're asking them to analyze and synthesize, yes. That's what I wanted to say, synthesize while they're writing. This can happen as early as a pre-K writer all the way right up to a grade 12 writer. When we want to also make sure that we link reading and writing, there is a myth out there that says that because we can read, we can write. But when we teach our students to read, not just for meaning, but also to discover clues about writer's craft, we make every reading venture a lesson in how to write. Whenever we have our students look at what the author has actually written there and what their meaning and their purpose was, it links it back. To each other, both reading and writing. Number nine is a foundation for real world writing. The strength and purpose of the six traits isn't just about the success in a school at any level. It's about students becoming strong, confident writers in any context for any purpose. So real world writing across the content, across the other purposes if they write for an essay for the American Legion or for a red ribbon or a pink ribbon activity. Those are real world writing opportunities and Sixth Trait offers a foundation there. And Sixth Trait's also a way of saving assessment time. When teachers abandon their own ways of grading and stop functioning as editors, you don't need to write everything on the student's paper and use a consistent criteria that are familiar with the student writers that would be your rubric and keep their comments to a minimum only in the margins. Assessment of that student writing is far more accurate and it takes the teacher less time to actually score. Rubrics acts as a kind of sure hand between you and your students. You don't need to say everything. The rubric says some of the things that you want students to notify. So in your margins, all you need to add are those, I think you need to look at a level, for instance, a level three in organization. Where are the, let them determine and find what is probably part of the problem rather than you having to consistently be their editor. So these are the 10 reasons to make Sixth Trait's writing a part of your instruction. Let's now move on and let's talk about the Sixth Trait model. Quickly on this slide, I'm gonna take you to the Sixth Trait. The first trait is ideas. That's the heart of the message and the topics that the piece supports with relevant details. Then we talk about organization. Organization, as the definition says here, is the internal structure of that piece. It's the order that helps it make sense. And we're talking about orders, no matter what type of writing, if they're doing narrative or descriptive or persuasive or informational writing, there are certain structures that are there. And you wanna make sure that the paragraphing also goes up here into organization. We wanna make sure that all of those transitions that a student used between the various parts of their writing are very smooth. Then we wanna get students to recognize that there's voice. Now that's the tone and the flavor of the author's message. What you have to remember, and you have to share with your students, is that voice makes you feel some type of an emotion. It gives you some type of a feedback that makes you connect with that story. Maybe it makes you smile. Maybe it makes you cry. Maybe it just goes around in circles and it just plain boards you. It doesn't have any voice if that's the case. But if you have any of those emotion, why there you have voice? Connection. And voice teachers often tell me is one of the hardest things to teach a student. And it does take a little bit more practice, but with correct modeling and using examples and non-examples, you definitely can develop voice within student writing. Word choice, that's the vocabulary that it's to student users to convey their meaning. Do they use words that paint pictures in your minds? Do they use words over and over again too often so that it becomes very sing-songy? We want to be able to make sure that we have a voice, a word choice that's going to offer and compliment the voice within the piece. Sense, fluency, that's the rhythm and the flow of the language. We wanna make sure that we have a few long sentences and a few short sentences that some of our paragraphs are longer in length and shorter in length. In other words, we wanna make sure that everything flows, it has flow, it works easily. If you've ever read writing and you needed to go back and re-read something, usually there's a sentence fluency problem within that particular piece or you have not cognitively been able to process that sentence because it's not quite clear to you. We have sense, fluency, conventions, that's all that mechanical stuff that's and the correctness of it, the spelling, the capitalization, the grammar and the usage, all of those things that we teach in a typical language arts class about our English language and how it functions. Now that we've talked about why we need to have used six traits of writing and we've defined each of the six traits, I'm gonna take you through a section now that talks about the qualities that teachers look for in writing. Naturally, we're gonna start with ideas. These are the qualities in front of you that teachers look for in writing when they're looking at ideas. They wanna make sure that the piece is clear, that it really makes sense. We wanna make sure that the reader's questions are all answered within that because if the reader has questions, then it lacks clarity. We wanna make sure that the writer has made sure that the topic is narrow enough and manageable enough that we don't have too many sub-stories going on. We've all read that novel where we can't tell when it's a flashback and when it's in a real time type of thing. So we need to make sure that the piece is narrow and manageable. If it doesn't have my attention, it won't score well for one thing. And I will have to drag myself through it in order to be able to complete this piece. We wanna make sure that the writer has the sound within it, that they know their topic well. In other words, they talk with strength and conviction. It's a fresh, original perspective because you can read anytime you read to a prompt, several papers written on that same prompt. You're drawn in by those papers that the writer has taken the opportunity to have an original, fresh perspective. They told you details that go beyond the common language. They have some insight to it. But then we look at some other papers that we just aren't quite sure if the writer knows the topic very well. So those are the qualities that teachers look for when we're talking about ideas. When we look at organization, these are the qualities that we look at. Is there an inviting lead? Does it make me wanna continue to read this paper and go on and complete this paper? Are there connections from detail to detail and paragraph to paragraph? Does it start somewhere and go somewhere? Or does it just stop? We wanna be able to predict and we want some surprises. We wanna satisfy in conclusion and a sense of resolution. And in the organization, that's where we teach students that when we get down to that conclusion or that closing of our piece of writing, we wanna make sure that it's just not a redundant summary, but there's actually vision and purpose within that. Voice, voice sounds like the whole person wrote it. Sounds like this writer, no one else. Brings the topic to life. There's punch, flair, style and courage. Makes the reader respond, cry, laugh, smile or even maybe get some chills off it out. You know, you really have a sense of involvement with that. When we talk about word choice, this is the place where we really wanna talk about strong verbs. We wanna have verbs that paint pictures. We want more than just, we want just the right words and the phrases there that actually make memorable moments for us. We want pictures in our minds. We want, it's like a movie when we read a piece, can we create a picture in our mind? Then it has great word choice. We wanna make sure that if there's any slang or jargon, it's there for a purpose. We want it to actually be very precise. Sentence, fluency, there are carefully crafted sentences. They vary in length. They have purposeful beginnings and transitions. In other words, there's a rhythm and a cadence and it's easy to read aloud and with voice whenever you're reading it. Remember how I told you if there's a problem, you kind of stumble over it. And last but not least, teachers look for in conventions, they want a nice clean edited and polished piece of paper to read. It has to be easy. There might be some problems with it, but there are no big glaring problems that are going to cause me to stumble over the piece of writing. I can just go right on past and it's not gonna have a problem. It's easy to focus on the ideas, the voice in the organization. So these are the six traits of writing and I have a little proposition and assignment for you. I want you to build a personal vision of writing instruction in your classroom. I want you to include what process and product are you going to create as classroom project? How are you going to help your students understand your expectations? And how does this increase your possibility of success? I want you to share examples, share examples, share examples of both strong and weak examples. And above all, the research is very strong about the need to model, model, model. I wouldn't give you an assignment like this without you actually sharing my own personal vision of writing instruction. I will be a writer myself. I'll set aside 15 to 20 minutes of direct writing instruction if not daily, no less than two sessions per week. I'm gonna teach, model and implement the writing process. I'm gonna be implementing, monitoring, modeling and adjusting lessons and technique. And I'm gonna teach and guide students to interpret and use the language of writing and the scoring guides to the use of examples and non-examples because I'm gonna incorporate writing into all of my subject areas. Now remember, I'm only gonna do 15 to 20 minutes of direct instruction, but I'm gonna incorporate writing into all subject areas. Doug Reeves shares with us, when students write more frequently, their ability to think, reason, analyze, communicate and perform on tests will improve. Writing is critical to student achievement. I wanna thank you for being a part of this webinar. I realize we've run over and I really appreciate my audience staying with me. These are the other three sessions that I will be putting together and sharing with you. These sessions and this session and all of the tools are available on the staff development Wiki page, which you can find on the staff development page of the ESU-8 home page. I welcome any comments and I've appreciated having you here with me today. Again, PowerPoint and all handouts will be made available to you. Thank you for participating and I look forward to working with you again in the future.