The teacher opens the lesson by asking students to nominate an image or a line as ‘most important.’ This is a classically open-ended request; no answer is going to be wrong if the student can explain why he or she selected it as important. This open-ended invitation serves to launch the discussion in a way that invites wide participation.

The teacher, though is immediate confronted with a minor challenge: a misreading of the poem (by speakers 3 and 4) as being about a dead baby (though the text clearly reads ‘The little one sleeps in his cradle.’ An interpretive challenge is posed here by the juxtaposition of the flies and the bloody suicide, if the students are not sufficiently tuned in to Whitman’s impressionist style (presenting an array of brief, unconnected images) or the typography of the poem which represents the disjunction with different stanzas.

The teacher responds with acceptance of the student’s contribution, first affirming the student’s initiative and innovativeness in selecting ‘brushing away the flies’ as the ‘most important image,’ and then confirming that flies might be associated with dead bodies. He signals the need for rethinking gently, by going on to ask for an explanation of the inference. Another student responds, extending or repeating speaker 3’s thought about flies and dead babies. Again, the teacher refrains from disagreeing with the (somewhat shaky) inference but instead pushes deeper in pursuit of evidence supporting the claim. 

A third student enters the discussion to disagree with the claim, citing textual evidence. This intervention demonstrates that in this class the norm of polite disagreement and student-student talk have been established. 

Subsequent contributions from additional students offer new candidate images (the brevity of life, maternal care for the baby), thus effectively diverting attention from the incorrect reading without ever explicitly rejecting Speaker 3’s claim. Note that the teacher projects himself as the one seeking clarity about the meaning of the poem (‘so I think that’s a little more clear to me now’), not as the holder of the one correct interpretation.

After the students have offered more-or-less well justified observations about the poem, the teacher relaunches the discussion by bringing up the previously taught notion of ‘justaposition,’ after which four different students offer their selected examples and interpretations of juxtapositions within the poem. This brief but rich conversation is entirely carried by the four student participants, with no prompting or reactions from the teacher.