Shining Bright

Story and Photo by Denise Jarrett Weeks

Ruth Culham could use a poem now, a few lines from her Uncle Don—Don Emblen, poet laureate for Sonoma County, California, and a retired professor at Santa Rosa Junior College. Now and again, he sends poems to his niece and other family members, always just at the right time, with just the right perception and encouragement.

"He writes these beautiful poems and gives them to his family, at different times in our lives," says Culham. This particular time in Culham's life is moving swiftly between great satisfactions and high anxieties. She's just moved into a new home and is still unpacking; she's booked around the country to train teachers in the 6+1 Trait™ Writing model; and her book, 6+1 Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide, has just been released by Scholastic, Inc. It's Culham's first book, and she can't help but wonder what readers will think of it. Will teachers find it helpful? Will reviewers think it adds something of value to the professional literature?

Last week, Scholastic flew her to Las Vegas for the official release of her book and to demonstrate for a gathering of book buyers the six-trait approach to teaching and assessing writing. She and the book were a hit, but the fan whose opinion she most cared about was Sam, her 26-year-old son who'd come along for the big event.

"At first I thought, great! Sam will come with me and we'll spend some time together, but then when it came time for my workshop, I got stage fright having him there. It was scary!" she says with a laugh. "But, he said the sweetest thing: 'Mom, you were so good!'"

Culham's success in teaching others how to use the trait-based approach to helping students learn to write well has not only made her a trainer in demand, it's helped make the videos, books, rubrics, posters, and other 6+1 Trait™ Writing paraphernalia developed by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory hot commodities. The 6+1 Trait™ products have long been NWREL's number-one sellers (available from the NWREL Products Catalog Online at www.nwrel.org/comm/catalog/). They've also become some of the most popular items sold by Carson-Dellosa Publishing Company, Inc. (www.carsondellosa.com), an educational publisher that contracts with NWREL to produce 6+1 Trait™ posters, organizers, sticky notes, and other classroom materials and sell them through local dealers all over the country.

Culham's book is the first time the Laboratory's model has been distilled into a guide to help teachers implement the approach in their own classrooms. The best way to learn to use the model, says Culham, is during workshops with certified trainers. But Culham, her colleague Janice Wright, and the dozen or so trainers they have working for them in various regions can't be everywhere at once. So, the guide is meant to give teachers a good start in learning how to use the traits to teach and assess writing.

Love of Language

More than anything else, the book project has made Culham feel an even stronger tie with her poet uncle. "I see what an influence his love of language has had on me," she says. While her mom always was an avid reader and modeled the joys that could be had from literature, "the real love of language came from him." Not unlike the graduate who returns to visit his professor in Emblen's poem, "A Philosophy Major Comes Back To Wish Me a Happy New Year"—"Yet, returneth he / to find out whence he comes"—Culham returns to his chapbooks now and again with renewed appreciation.

During childhood, Culham's family moved a lot, from one town to another in California and Arizona. By the time she was to start high school, her mom put her foot down: They were staying put in Pasadena. Her dad, a watchmaker, could not still his "wanderlust" and so kept moving. With hindsight, Culham credits her mom for getting her into the best high school she could, by renting a house in affluent South Pasadena where she believes she received a "world class education." She went on to earn, first, a degree in education, then a master's in English, from University of Montana in Missoula and a doctorate in education from the American University of Asturias in Spain. Her graduate adviser, Beverly Ann Chin, a past president of the National Council for Teachers of English, is still a close friend and wrote the foreword to her book.

For the next 15 years, Culham —being chosen Montana's English Teacher of the Year—taught middle school in Missoula, and got married and had a baby. When her husband was offered a job in Portland, Oregon, she accepted a position with the Beaverton School District, teaching high school English. She was in mid-career, at a time when burnout can easily set in, but she was coteaching with a beginning teacher who kept her "energized" and open to new ideas. Now, this is what she tries to do for other teachers at her workshops.

"When you start teaching, there's a kind of missionary zeal that you have; you believe that you have something to offer the next generation, and that sustains you for a while," she says, "but for so many teachers, by mid-career, they've gotten dragged down by politics, by demands of their district. "To be really good, they have to rediscover their talents and their zeal for teaching. And that's what I try to lead them back to, by creating opportunities for them to rediscover themselves as teachers."

Culham says she gives them "permission" to let go of some of the old chestnuts of teaching language arts, such as relying overly on spelling tests, memorizing vocabulary lists, and penmanship. Instead, she urges them to connect language learning with other aspects of the school day by integrating reading and writing with other subjects, and encouraging dialogue by asking children open-ended questions about their ideas and reasoning.

When assessing students' writing, she advises, assess one trait at a time, respecting students' drafts by not marking every single error. "Squeeze it once, and let it go," she says, passing on a favorite phrase of the author Ralph Fletcher. There's ample opportunity, through the revision process or in another writing assignment altogether, to address other things that need attention.

"As a trainer, you've got to validate teachers' good work, but also give them something they can use to move on to another level," says Culham. "I try to find a way to help them tap into that energy they had when they started teaching. They didn't go into teaching for the money or the summer vacation; they went into it because they wanted to help kids."

Positive Work

Culham came to the Laboratory in 1991, joining a team of people who'd begun to develop, with the help of classroom teachers in Montana and Oregon, a model for teaching and assessing writing.

"When I came to the Laboratory, there was all of this positive work going on by Rick Stiggins, Judy Arter, and Vicki Spandel. I came in as someone with the most classroom experience among us. So I started working on what I knew best, developing classroom lessons" that focused on each key trait of good writing: ideas, organization, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, voice, and presentation. "It was like going to school, working with them. I learned so much."

Stiggins went on to found the Assessment Training Institute in Portland, and Arter joined him there. Spandel now works for Houghton Mifflin's Great Source Education Group. Under Culham's care over the past 11 years, the Laboratory's 6+1 Trait™ Writing model has been developed into a leading professional development and assessment model that is used across the United States and abroad, and is the basis for some state writing assessment tools.

"I feel like I've done a lot in 11 years," she says. What will the next decade of work look like for her? Scholastic already wants her to write another book, a 6+1 Trait™ Writing guide for primary teachers. There's a NWREL study underway of schools that have been using the model successfully. Culham would like to help determine what strategies they're using to make the model so effective in their schools. And it's time to update Picture Books, an annotated bibliography of picture books categorized by the traits they exemplify.

But there are two others things Culham's always wanted to do: write a children's chapter book, and start a school that could be a demonstration site for best practices. Perhaps another well-timed poem will give her just the lift she needs to make these wishes come true, too.

"The stars are shining bright," she says with a smile.

To order 6+1 Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide, contact Scholastic, Inc. at 1-800-SCHOLASTIC.

Respond to this article