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Anchorage, Alaska—It had the taste of melted toothpaste. He spat it out as he looked again at the label on the bottle. It read "beer," an English word he readily recognized, but it was a bottle of root beer he'd chosen from the college cafeteria, not the cerveza he'd grown up drinking with his family at the dinner table. A proud young man, he nevertheless felt the hot discomfort of embarrassment as he sat, alone, in the crowded cafeteria.
It was the 1970s, and Enrique Quintero had just arrived in the United States from Ecuador. Back home in Quito, the capital of that country, the young Quintero and other students had rebelled noisily against the military dictatorship. His parents had sent him here, to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—out of harm's way—where, an impassioned idealist, he was going to study political science. Yet here he sat, his first day at college, withdrawn and uncertain of his place. He hadn't even been sure where to sit; all the black kids were sitting on one side of the room and all the white kids on the other. He'd taken an empty seat in the middle.
Quintero, now 51 and a bilingual teacher for some of Anchorage's poorest children at North Star Elementary School, laughs, remembering that day. It's a funny story as he tells it, but he's making a point. Even coming from relative privilege and having English skills, he'd felt frustrated and isolated behind a language and culture barrier. It cut an indelible impression in his memory, and he thinks of that episode sometimes as he teaches some of the youngest who've found themselves strangers in a strange land.
"Children adapt faster than adults to new cultural settings, but that doesn't mean they don't go through hard times. This is a huge school," he says of North Star's 530-student population in which 29 different languages are spoken and two-thirds of students live in poverty. "Most of these [bilingual] students come from a rural place. Some have never been to school before. Everything is different, from the way the classroom looks to the clothes, the food, and the sounds. Then, they go home to something that's no longer the way it used to be, either."
Perhaps more than others, bilingual children struggle with identity. "Teachers need to be aware of that and to open spaces in their classrooms for these kids to have existential identities," says Quintero, "which is difficult when you are out of one culture and not quite in the other culture."
Allowing children to tell their own stories, particularly in writing, is one of the surest ways to help them reveal their true selves, he says. "Writing is the most difficult thing to teach [bilingual] students, but writing—more than speaking—gets closest to meaning. You can get closer to a person through his writing than by talking with him."
That's because the act of writing enriches your thinking, Quintero says. When you write, you make all kinds of choices—about vocabulary, ideas, organization—that reveal your deeper thoughts and personality. You layer meaning, connect ideas, make revisions, all with the building blocks of words, grammar, and syntax. And this artifact of your thinking is evidence of who you are.
Even if they speak minimal English, bilingual students can use language—their home language as well as their emerging English skills—to share their own stories and ideas in the classroom. This speeds them along their way to mastering English and taking their places in society, says Quintero.
At North Star, Quintero and other teachers use the 6+1 Trait™ Writing model, a nonprescriptive approach for teaching and assessing writing that draws on students' own ideas and experiences. The model, developed by classroom teachers and writing experts from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL), has helped to create a common vocabulary in the school for talking about the aspects of good writing. From kindergarten through sixth grade, students and teachers know what is meant by these traits: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation. This common vocabulary not only crosses grade levels, it crosses languages as well.
"The guiding concepts around which you organize the writing process are applicable for any language," Quintero says. This transferability has been vitally important here, in one of the most language-diverse schools in an increasingly diverse school district. Children living in Anchorage, a city of about 260,000, are increasingly from Mexico, Korea, Vietnam, Ukraine, Romania, South America—from any place in the world. In four years, predicts the Anchorage School District, ethnic minority students may well comprise the majority of the student population.
While a third of North Star's students do not speak English at home, many do not have homes at all. Fifty children of homeless families are attending North Star Elementary this year. They are delivered to the school's door each morning by vans from local homeless shelters or by city bus, their tokens paid for by the Anchorage School District's Child in Transition/Homeless Project. The program, run by the district's Title I program and housed at North Star, serves about 1,000 children each year in schools throughout the district. It helps to coordinate services provided by community agencies, the district, and schools, including transportation, counseling, purchasing of school supplies, tutoring, family activities, and parenting classes.
In a recent count, the district had more than 1,500 homeless students. Obviously, it's a big problem in this far north city, says Anchorage School Board member Harriet Drummond. Her sons were students at North Star Elementary in the mid-1990s, when homelessness and other family misfortunes contributed to a student mobility rate topping 90 percent. She recalls her youngest son having a hard time making friends because he didn't know who would be there from day to day. Homelessness, like the language gap, contributes to students' sense of isolation. As PTA president, Drummond saw firsthand the determination of the then-new principal, Myrna Moulton, to slow the turnover by caring for the needs of her students at every front.
"Myrna has made it a warm and welcoming place," she says, "and they have a wonderful number of innovative programs" that are helping to improve student achievement and lower mobility, now at about 60 percent. The school was honored for its successes by the U.S. Department of Education in 2000, when it chose North Star as a Distinguished Title I School. "Even if parents have to move out of the school's attendance area, she makes it possible for them to keep their kids at North Star," says Drummond.
Drummond lives a few blocks from North Star in a well-to-do enclave of Spenard, one of Anchorage's oldest—and, some say, notorious—sections of town. Neighborhood bars like the popular "sourdough" saloon, Chilkoot's, and the more hip Fly By Night, a hot spot for jazz and poetry slams, like to tout Spenard's old reputation as a red-light district. But today, the area is a richer mix of corporate and mom-and-pop commerce, high- and low-income housing developments, littered alleys, and pristine parks.
The students at North Star, naturally, are just as diverse. While many struggle with literacy—either because English isn't their native language or they come from poor, "print-deprived" homes—others come to school with good reading and writing skills. Closing this literacy divide in the classroom is something Principal Myrna Moulton and her staff members have made a priority.
The first thing they recognized was that pull-out programs weren't working. So many children needed bilingual and special education that classrooms had "revolving doors," with children coming and going all day long to attend support classes down the hall. So they scrapped the pull-out programs. Instead, Title I, special education, and bilingual teachers all began supporting students' learning in their homerooms, collaborating with the regular classroom teacher—every day.
"We just have a huge need here and providing services directly in the classroom, rather than pulling out a bunch of kids from the classroom several times a day, meets their needs better," says Amy Lyman, a Title I teacher.
There's one important exception: the language center. About 40 students of all grade levels who need intensive bilingual education because they have scant, if any, English skills, spend mornings from nine to noon together in the language center. They learn English largely through writing and reading. Afternoons, they rejoin their classmates in their homerooms. The language center allows Quintero, who designed the program, and four bilingual aides to prepare monolingual students to go beyond mere survival English and begin mastering "academic" language.
"Students are able to learn what we call 'social' English quite fast" because it's highly contextual, says Quintero, but academic language is about abstract ideas that require more complex language skills. Mastering these skills can take five to eight years, he says. But by teaching English through writing and reading, rather than solely through vocabulary drills and rote exercises—traditional methods of bilingual ed—Quintero and his colleagues are trying to shorten that period of time.
"At the same time that they're learning how to speak English, they're learning how to read and write in English, so it has an immediate value in their regular classrooms," he says.
Bilingual students who are more proficient in English spend the whole day in their homerooms, receiving individualized support in the classroom from bilingual aides. Afternoons, students of all language abilities are together in their homerooms.
Moulton brings a lot of resources to bear on supporting students' language acquisition. By coordinating some special programs, she and her staff have been able to create block time in reading and language arts, as well as mathematics. They're continuing a successful reading incentive program involving parent volunteers, as well as First Steps Reading, a model linking classroom instruction with child development. Rotary Readers, volunteers from the Anchorage International Rotary, tutor students in reading and sponsor activities and book purchases. Moulton and her staff carve out precious hours for professional development from staff meeting times, inservice days, and support classes, using the time to hone their instructional strategies in reading and writing.
The school is in a five-year partnership with NWREL, which is helping it to devise efficient ways to work collaboratively toward school priorities. All teachers now serve on committees that help the school meet its goals in writing, reading, math, technology, safety, morale building, grant writing, science and social studies, student discipline, and fine arts. Authors Night is one popular activity organized by the writing committee, providing a forum in which students read from their own stories to an audience of parents and families.
All of these efforts have helped boost student learning, Moulton says. Though high student mobility makes it very difficult for the school to show consistent gains in student achievement scores, tests show that students who stay at the school for a full year before a test are scoring increasingly higher in reading, language arts, and mathematics.
It's August, just days before school starts, and Quintero and a group of fellow North Star teachers are gathered this morning in the language center for a day of staff training. It's a bit too warm in the room, and everyone would rather, truthfully, be back in his classroom arranging learning centers and going over lesson plans.
But Ruth Culham, one of the developers of the 6+1 Trait™ Writing instruction and assessment model and a NWREL trainer, is a rousing speaker. In short order, all eyes are trained on her and the colorful picture books she holds up, examples of good storytelling that are bound to inspire young writers. Soon, she has them up on their feet performing characters from Margie Palatini and Richard Egielski's picture book, The Web Files, and, later, furiously penning poems about the traits of good writing.
The traits, Culham says in the introduction to her book 6+1 Traits of Writing, recently released by Scholastic, are characteristics that make a piece of writing work. The traits and scoring rubrics in the 6+1 Trait™ Writing model provide "a vocabulary teachers use to describe their vision of what good writing looks like—any kind of writing," whether it's a story, essay, or persuasive article, she says. Just now, a group has come out of a huddle to read from a poem the teachers have written describing the importance of "voice"—the hardest trait to teach, some say:
The important thing about voice
Is that it is YOU, your sparkle,
Your personal passions and emotions.
It's tantalizing and unique; YOUR
Heart and soul revealed to the world.
Voice is when the writer seems to speak directly to the reader in a way that is individual and compelling. But, like unheard cries from a deep well, the "voices" of children who aren't native English speakers are often trapped inside themselves. So, how do you help these students to use their emerging English skills to express their own ideas and experiences—in ways that reveal their "hearts and souls"?
"Many of these kids don't live in a print-rich world, but they haven't been living in a vacuum," says Culham. "They have observations of life. They have their life stories. What is it they already know? They may not have English language, but they know a lot of stuff." You can help children's language development by talking with them, reading with them, and asking them lots of questions about their lives, she says.
Culham frequently looks to the writings of Donald Graves, author of Writing: Teachers and Children at Work (Heinemann, 1982), for ways to help children come up with ideas to write about. She likes to share this quote from Graves's book with the teachers in her workshops:
Children who are fed topics, story starters, lead sentences, even opening paragraphs as a steady diet for three or four years, rightfully panic when topics have to come from them. The anxiety is not unlike that of the child whose mother has just turned off the television set. "Now what do I do?" bellows the child.
To prompt students to draw on their own experiences, Culham cites Graves's suggestion to observe a child during his or her day and ask her questions: "Why did you...?" "How did you...?" "I notice that you...," and "What will you do when...?"
Such questions not only call on a child's language skills, but they let the child know that it matters what she thinks. That validation can be powerfully motivating to a student who's grappling to master a new language and fit into a new culture. Teachers can also help her bridge her home life with school, says Culham, by asking such things as: "What are your jobs at home?" and "What's the first thing you do when you get home?"
"These are all very tangible ideas about their lives" that they can draw on as they develop English language skills. As teachers, says Culham, "we've got to get inside these kids' experiences."
What did you do on your summer vacation? It's a timeless back-to-school writing prompt that brings forth pencil-smudged papers on visits to Disneyland and camping trips. But what do you write about if you've never been on a family vacation? Or if you've barely been to school? How do you write about your life when it seems to differ in every way from the stories your classmates are telling?
Teacher Peggy Brannon had to ask herself these questions the first fall she taught at North Star Elementary. The writing exercise was a perennial hit at her previous school in relatively affluent South Anchorage, but her fourth-graders at North Star looked at her as if she had two heads.
"It went over like a lead balloon," Brannon recalls. "Most of the kids had never been out of Anchorage," much less on a grand vacation. The majority of her students were learning English for the first time, 13 had learning disabilities, and some were living in homeless shelters.
Sometimes, simply creating an experience in the classroom becomes grist for storytelling. Last year, Brannon piqued her students' storytelling instincts by delighting them with theatrics. She came to class one morning as "Lucy Mae," costumed as a Southern belle with a hat, smile, and drawl wide enough for the Kentucky Derby.
"One of the writing lessons is on providing details, so I asked them to describe Lucy Mae. I told them, don't just say she wore a hat. Describe what kind of hat, with what kind of flower and feathers. Some created a whole world for her. Their writing became very descriptive, even if they only wrote a few lines."
Lucy Mae's slow stroll into the classroom "was a very big deal to them," Brannon says with a laugh, and it inspired them to make some "spectacular" word choices. "One student wrote that Lucy Mae 'sauntered' into the room, so, sooner or later, everyone's characters were sauntering and sashaying into the room." Reading and writing "takes them out of their world," she says, even when they're writing about that world. From an outside-looking-in vantage point, they can see the possibility of escape to a brighter future. Well, to a teacher, nothing tops that. It's what keeps Brannon coming back to these students, to throw them a lifeline out of the deep well of isolation.
"The six-traits writing just did it for me. It makes it so easy to explain to students what good writing looks like," says Brannon. Having yet to teach the same grade level twice, Brannon has found it invaluable that, at every grade level, North Star students learn about the six traits of writing. Students become savvy users of the traits, she says, able to tell anyone, for example, that sentence fluency is when "words flow on the page" or that focused ideas will grip the reader's attention.
Sometimes, she writes along with her students to a writing prompt, intentionally crafting a boring opening or making a couple of common writing errors. "That helps more than anything to say, 'Here's my story. What do you think?'" she says.
Last year, Brannon co-taught a blended fourth- and fifth-grade class with another teacher. They each would write along to prompts, beautifully illustrating how two very different pieces of writing can both be successful. "Our writing was completely different, and the kids could see our different styles and see, 'Oh, I don't have to write like everyone else.'"
Using money from a grant, North Star has bought scores of children's books that exemplify the traits of good writing. Brannon and several other teachers kept track of the books they selected for each lesson in a particular trait, and placed their lesson plans and matching book titles together in folders in one of the library's filing cabinets for others to use. She dipped liberally into that treasure trove herself.
"Every single one of those lessons has worked like a charm," she says.
The school also bought a number of books from a series that connects math and literature. The series groups literature books by math concept and grade level and, as teachers use the books in their classrooms, they file their lesson plans in the library for others to use, too.
In fact, Moulton and her staff feel the time is right to shift their schoolwide focus to math, particularly teaching kids how to bring their writing skills to math problem solving.
"It's crucial to make connections between math and writing" in the classroom, says Amy Lyman, because in problem solving, "you don't just write down the answer as '11,' you explain why your answer is '11.'"
For children whose lives have been disconnected in one way or another, writing can be a through-line that connects their inner and public lives, their understanding of the world with new knowledge, their individualism with identity. So when Ruth Culham asks the teachers in her workshop on that fall day in Anchorage, "Literacy, is there a greater gift you can give someone?", the question rings true.
Enrique Quintero hadn't planned to be a teacher. Rather, he'd prepared to be a sociologist with hopes of changing the world. But here, giving the gift of
literacy, he may be making the biggest difference of all. "It is an honorable profession. It is a profession that denies you certain kinds of satisfactions, but gives you other ones," he says. "I feel good about what I do." 
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