Not current (2005)

Presenting Your Dialogue Journals

Purpose: Your Dialogue Journals play a vital role in the creation of your Critical Self-Reflections, which, in turn, will play a vital role in the development and assessment of your Final Portfolios. Presenting your Dialogue Journal to me will give you the opportunity to synthesize some of your key experiences as a writer thus far—which is exactly what you will be expected to do in the final paper you will be developing in English 100.

What is this? Soon I will ask you to sign up for a 15 minute conference with me, at which point you will present yourself as a writer through key entries and ideas generated in your Dialogue Journal. As I’ve said, this experience will be an important one as you pull together your experienced to present yourself as a writer to a panel of experts who will be reading and assessing your Final Portfolios. Take this seriously!

Before you meet with me, however, you should complete the following steps:

STEP I: Read through your Dialogue Journal thus far and highlight sentences, phrases, and ideas you find most interesting and telling.

STEP II: Develop answers to the following questions from this reading:

(NOTE: You will be asked to share an entry or two from your journal that help us understand the ways in which each lesson unfolded for you.)

1. What are two specific lessons you have learned about yourself as a writer thus far?
2. What are two specific lessons you have learned about yourself as a reader thus far?
3. Share something else you have learned about literacy.
4. Identify one key entry from your Dialogue Journal that really sums up your perspective on literacy thus far. I will ask you to read that entry to me during our meeting.

Step III: Organize your findings so you can present them to me efficiently and coherently. It may be useful for you to present these findings to someone else first.

On the day of your meeting with me:

• Double-check all your materials to be certain that you have everything you need to present your findings to me in a coherent, organized, useful way.
• Come to your meeting on time.
• I will be asking questions during our meeting to keep that productive dialogue going, but you should be prepared to share the items detailed above in the order above (1-4).

If you must miss your meeting with me:

You should know that this meeting is a course requirement. If you miss, you will lose five points on your semester average. Do not miss this meeting. You are scheduling them during our regularly-scheduled meeting time, so there should not be any conflicts.