The Six Traits of Writing

There's a common practice in public schools (and also, unfortunately, in my C&T 100 class) of creating lists of considerations relevant to a particular topic and presenting these as if they were themselves facts. Sometimes these are presented as the # ____ of something, or in a goal-oriented fashion as the # steps to better ______.

There was a passage from Jonathon Kozol's The Shame of the Nation that caught my interest on this topic (my emphasis):

     Educators who have read parts of this book in preparation have observed that certain of the highly formalized vocabularies that accompany the programs I've described, as well as the various lists and charts that break down cognitive activities into unusually tiny units that seemed arbitrary and bizarre to me, have their origins in academic work on learning theory on the part of scholars who would not be likely to approve of the constricting ways in which their work has often been applied.
     During one of my visits to P.S. 65, for instance, Mr. Endicott directed my attention to a poster on the wall, headed by the three words "Understanding by Design," which broke down the act of understanding into several elements that teachers were to emphasize in a specific sequence. ("Explanation," "Application," and "Empathy" were three of them. There were six in all, but I did not have time to write the others.) I remember thinking it was odd to be so confident about our knowledge of one of the greatest mysteries of life as to believe that we can subdivide the act of understanding into six established categories and then post these on the wall as a reminder to the students. I still think it's odd. The notion that there really are "six elements of understanding" does not seem believable to me.
     I mentioned this once during a seminar with educators and was told that this idea had been developed by a highly admired specialist in curriculum design who had described these elements as "the Six Facets of Understanding." I was cautioned not to be dismissive of a concept that is seen by teacher-educators as a helpful way of giving future teachers a schematic tool for thinking about education in the elementary grades. I felt reproved; I didn't like the feeling that I'd inadvertently been disrespectful of a scholar who, they told me, would not like to be identified with the rigidity and absoluteness that this classroom seemed to typify.
     The problem for me, I realized later, wasn't the theory as a framework for reflection among teachers but the way this theory had been concretized into six items posted on a wall, as if they were as scientific as the items on a periodic table. It struck me as a way of locking-down a child's capability for thinking rather than an aperture for understanding.
     On the wall of a fifth grade class in Seattle's Thurgood Marshall School the year that I first visited, there was a list of 44 sentences describing the proficiencies of language arts that children must achieve to be considered Level Threes. "I am proficient," according to one of these sentences, "in considering the six traits of writing so I can improve my work before I share it."
     Intrigued to find the number six appearing once again, I asked the teacher, "What are the 'six traits'?"
     She said she had them written down and could find them for me but could not remember all six at the time.
     I asked, "Why do you teach this?"
     The teacher answered that it was required for a writing test the class would have to take. When I later was provided with the list, I thought that most of the items it contained made reasonable sense ("good organization," "correct conventions," and "sound ideas" were three of them), although I couldn't help but notice that no credit would be given to a child for original ideas or for originality of style. The list was practical, and probably innocuous, but calling these "the six traits"—rather than six items someone had selected for convenience out of an innumerable number of such traits—was obviously arbitrary. The numbers made it possible for state examiners to judge a child's offerings empirically and not to have to look at other attributes, like charm or humor or sincerity or, on the reverse side, dutiful banality, which is unhappily the usual result of this kind of instruction.