French Revolution assignment:  Students were asked to read a portion of their history textbook about the National Assembly's evolution into the National Convention and the resulting Reign of Terror.  Students knew that they would have an assignment later in which they would need to guess what philosophers like Voltaire or Locke might say about different types of government we were studying in France.  They were not told which parts of the text to mark closely or what to reflect upon; they were simply told to create a dialogue journal as they read.

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World War I assignment:  Students were asked to create a dialogue journal as they read a section of their text about the peace agreements at the end of World War I.  Students had already completed a simulation of this process; they were told to be on the lookout during this assignment for similarities or differences between what their own groups negotiated and what the actual Treaty of Versailles said.  The number and nature of the reflections varied depending on which country each student was assigned to during the simulation.  A follow-up assignment required students to compare their class room treaties with the ones actually negotiated (according to the textbook).  Note that in this assignment, the dialogue journal allows the teacher to catch a student who has insufficient understanding before the historical writing task (comparison paragraph) is completed.

          Click here to see a sample of student AA's work on this assignment