A high school English teacher assigned to a class of underachieving eleventh grade students encountered numerous difficulties with the students' behavior and their resistance to writing. Most were disruptive in class, hostile to reading and writing assignments, and had troubled home lives. To combat the problem, the teacher developed a hierarchical scale of the students' needs based on Maslow's theory that basic needs precede higher development. The students appeared to need (1) an orderly, reliable, trustworthy environment; (2) control of their own behavior; and (3) a willingness to interact with the environment before they could begin to work on self-awareness, goal-setting, and writing skills. To establish a trustworthy environment, dialogue journals were implemented that established ongoing, one-on-one conversations between teacher and student. In the journals, students discussed, among other things, their lives outside of school, their work in class, and what they felt about reading assignments. The journals showed students that their ideas would be taken seriously and made them more comfortable with writing frequently. A second strategy, a point system, gave students immediate feedback about their progress in class and alleviated confusion about how grades were assigned. The point system and the journals proved to be very effective, as indicated by higher student grades at the end of the semester. In addition, the teacher learned from the students when best to intervene, that a relationship based on trust that also modeled the writing process elicited the most positive responses, and that the objective system of behavioral guidelines neutralized negative interactions. (Three references are included.) (JC)