You're better versed in broader philosophy than me, so no worries! Essentially, dialectics is characterized as the following:
- Dialectics does not regard nature as a collection of static, isolated objects, but as connected, dependent, and determined by each other.
- Dialectics considers everything as in a state of continuous movement and change, of renewal and development, where something is always rising and something is always dying away.
- Dialectics is not a simple process of growth, but where quantitative buildup results in qualitative change, and qualitative change result in quantitative outcomes, as a leap in state from one to the other, the lower to the higher, the simple to the complex.
- Dialectics holds that the process of development from lower to higher takes place as a struggle of opposite tendencies that forms the basis of their contradictions.
You've got the gist of it, for Hegel turn the Marxist dialectic back on its head and assume all change is in the advancement of a grand, supernatural Absolute Idea.