Her instructions to students were simple. She prompted them to:

1. Write about what they read.

2. Write about and explain what they thought and felt while reading.

3. Write about and explain what they liked and disliked from their reading.

4. Write about what the books said to them.

5. Write about what the books meant to them.

6. Ask questions or for help in understanding their reading, etc. 

7. Write back to her about how she responded with her own ideas and feelings, as well as the questions she asked them in her letters. 

As far as the teacher side of dialogue journals, she also had plenty of advice gleaned from years of experience. She has found the balance of responding “specifically and personally” (166), and encourages instructors to:

1. Not respond too personally; it’s not necessarily wise to try to counsel students on their personal problems because you’re not properly trained for that.

2. Remember that the letters should not test their reading skills: don’t bombard them with questions (one is usually enough) and respond to them with curiosity while inserting your own experiences and connections.

3. Not test their writing or punish them for improper grammar; as they are low-stakes unpolished letters, only respond to this if their errors affect your ability to read and comprehend what they’re saying.

4. Find the balance of being an “experienced reader, mentor, and teacher responsible to her adolescent students” (167). In order to do this, Atwell:

   1. Shared what she learned about reading

   2. Offered her students advice and expertise where she thought it would be helpful

   3. “Nudged” her students when she thought they needed a push in the right direction

Her approach brought her great success with her students. One particular student read 21 books and showed three years of progress in one, which is astounding. As she had suspected, students went much deeper with their reading than their conversations and their regular exchanges with an expert (Atwell herself) pushed their reading to an entirely new level. After a year in her class, she felt they could easily hold their own around her dining room table. 

A couple of things she mentions about Holy Cross that effect this discussion overall:

1.) Comp is, evidently not required for students at this school, but over 90% of them take it anyway as a desire of their programs and profs.

2.) All teachers, "regardless of rank" teach the introductory writing course and often share materials very freely

3.) Holy Cross has very high achieving students, likely a result of their admission process. Whall chalks this up to luck, but it colors a little of the subject differently later (I think the class's ability to wrestle with Shakespeare at all probably reflects both a previous exposure and a life not burdened with other things).

Her activities are meant to help students recognize structure, comment on structure, show comprehension, and offer analysis.

Whall indicates "it is a course that uses poetry to teach the discipline of critical thought and conscious information retrieval It is a system that harnesses the intelligence of individuals students so that they might best know how to be in charge of where to lead that force" Whall 132).

Whall believes that if students understand structure, then they understand that a writer who breaks away from that structure is making a comment on the structure itself. She says "only after students have grasped that there are such things as grammatical rules will I introduce poetry that gleefully breaks them. Then I can say, Ah, but now you know that breaking a rule communicates meaning and if you didn't know the rule, you couldn't argue that 'opinion'" (124).

This is not dissimilar to the "Picasso" argument often made in our classrooms. You may like that abstract art, we say, but know that he was classically trained and he knew which rules he was breaking.

This is also an argument about toolsets and code-switching and making ourselves and our students more aware of more things and more ways of communicating so any one choice is a choice and not the only way a person is able to communicate.

Neither is teaching Shakespeare.

Is Shakespeare incredible? Amazing? Bewilderingly good? Totally. But he also died some four HUNDRED YEARS AGO and I think there's no harm in finding something students can already relate to, speaks to issues that matter to them, etc., and gives them plenty to talk about.

Two authors I assign in my poetry classes are Ocean Vuong and Ada Limon. They're both American, People of Color and they write about love and nature and pain and grief and all the topics Shakespeare wrote about, but from a perspective that's modern, and amazing, and bewilderingly good.

Also, many of us don't teach in environments where our students all had top scores on the SAT and flood our classrooms even though our classes are optional. If we took that approach in community college, for instance, our classrooms would all be empty. The other classes would suffer, sure, but requiring introductory writing classes isn't anything I'm willing to mess with and nor should you be.

Also, the activities she shares here for pulling apart any poem could be broadly useful to other poems, but also to essays or even other forms of media like advertisements.

In a dialectical journal, each entry is double-sided. The two pages face each other in a kind of dialogue. The first page is for observations, responses to readings or other responses, quotes, sketches, impressions, etc. The second page is for meta-commentary or notes on the notes. It is a place for the writer to respond to their own responses, think about their own thinking, and interpret their interpretations.

2.  Describe the four habits of mind (with a brief description) she says dialectical journals encourage.

1.        Looking and looking again

Looking carefully is a key skill for any learner. This habit enforces the willingness to look back and reassess what was given or claimed. This habit is the basis of learning to think. It pushes the learner beyond the already stated knowledge to question and carefully observe what they see.

2.        Fostering fluency: gush vs. dialectic

This habit fosters the development of a lexicon, instead of the “gush” of random knowledge without thought to the meaning or weight of the words. Berthoff talks about “generating chaos” and its ability to make the writer look again and develop the words and phrases of a dialectical fluency.

3.        Tolerating ambiguity

Being comfortable in the chaos allows writers to begin to tolerate ambiguities. The writing and then reassessment of ambiguities allows them to be identified, addressed and resolved of contradictions or paradoxes. A novice writer may try to cover up the ambiguity. A user of the dialectical notebook can leave things tentative and do the work to resolve and revise.

4.        Coming to terms with allatonceness

Composing is a true example of allatonceness (all-at-once-ness, ala Mashall McLuhan). Everything happens at once; expression, representation, meaning making, etc. Being able to accept this allatonceness allows the writer to take composing from a formidable foe to an ally in learning and meaning making. The notebook emphasizes the interdependence of reading and writing, listening and speaking. It allows for the two sides to be juxtaposed and reassessed as needed.

3.  Elaborate on one of the kinds of thinking she says is necessary to useful academic inquiry.

The kind of thinking most appropriate to inquiry is abduction. Abductive reasoning seeks to find the simplest and most likely explanation for a question. Berthoff describes it as “going sideways” by using the current knowledge to develop hypotheses, inferences, analogies, and to put claims to the test. This kind of reasoning keeps the what of the issue in dialectical alignment with the how. It draws the thinker to explore how changes in language change meaning.