According to Northwestern University, "her second book, Turning the Soul: Teaching Through Conversation, received the American Education Studies Critics Choice Award in 1994.
"[1] By comparing two high school classes' discussions of Romeo and Juliet, Turning the Soul, "offers an alternative to methods advocated by conventional educational practice".
The reader watches as students in each group begin to draw upon experiences in their personal lives to speculate about events in the play.
Because Turning the Soul draws on actual classroom conversations, it presents the range of difficulties that one encounters in interpretive discussion.
The book describes the assumptions about learning that the use of such discussion in the classroom presupposes, and it offers a theoretical perspective from which to view the changes in both students and teachers.