Yesterday was a professional development day. Kids were home. Teachers met in the school library and talked about the Six Traits writing framework.

Six Traits is an analytical framework for evaluating student writing. It is also useful as an instructional tool which can give us a common language we can use to talk about good writing with kids. The Six Trait model looks at writing in terms of

  • Ideas (interesting and important),
  • Organization (logical and effective),
  • Voice (individual and appropriate),
  • Word Choice(specific and memorable),
  • Sentence Fluency (smooth and musical),
  • Conventions (correct and communicative).

We spent the morning looking at examples of the writing of both students and professional authors, sharing readings from trade books, and discussing strategies for teaching.

It was a great training session, developed by a former staff member who now works with the Alaska Statewide Mentor Program. One of the teachers sitting near me said, “I remember when I used to feel like a good teacher.” I understood what she meant. Staff training used to focus on instruction and curriculum, and we felt like we were learning things that would help us to be better teachers. Now we talk about achievement - and measurement. And the thing is, if you don’t believe that test scores are a true measure of what the kids know and can do, what they’ve learned and how far they’ve come; and if test scores are all that anyone wants to look at anymore, then what’s the point? Every now and then it’s good to remember that we’re there to do what we know is good for the kids, giving them time to grow, discover talents and follow interests that nobody else may ever explore with them. And it was a treat to spend time talking about something that might really matter to somebody.

Our afternoon session brought us back to earth as we now know it. We learned that additional Title 1 support personnel will soon be hired to help us out. We spent an hour in grade level teams rearranging our schedules to try to figure out how to make use of yet another instructional support position. I was unhappy about having to fragment the class even more than it already is, and asked why we couldn’t simply assign an aide to each teacher for the whole day - there are so many of them in the building now. The answer was that the federal regulations don’t allow that. Grrrrr.

People think that elementary classrooms are self contained, and that one teacher maintains responsibility for a single group of students. This is only partly true. We do have responsibility, but we don’t actually work with all of our students, all day. Out of 24.5 possible contact hours each week, I see my whole class together for 13.75 hours, and I share my students with about a dozen other teachers and aides. Students come and go all day. They go to Resource reading, Choir, Math, instrumental music, Counseling, and Speech. They get pulled out for testing occasionally. A teacher’s aide comes in for part of the math period.

Trying to schedule more help fragments the day even further, and requires additional effort to coordinate all the people. I lucked out this time, though, and found a block of time for someone to come in and help with writing instruction each day. It’s the most difficult subject to teach unassisted because most of the important teaching is one:one. And it needs to happen consistently, daily, for the kids to get good at it. Not all the kids will be there each day, and now I have to figure out what to do about Social Studies…but I think this might be a good turn of events….as long as we get someone who knows how to conference with kids about writing, and maybe wants to learn something about the internet.